


Endgame

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: My Family (And Other Dinosaurs) [22]
Category: Primeval
Genre: F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-31
Updated: 2009-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 21:54:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 41,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3265718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We’re all dying, say the more pessimistic philosophers: if that’s so, Jamie Burke-Lester is doing it a lot faster than most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Luka beta'd this for me; I owe thanks to her and to many others for their patience and encouragement.

            There was a dark-haired teenager in a big city at ten past one in the afternoon, and she was skipping school.

 

            She was old enough to get away with it, her height, build, and air of purpose –not to mention the lack of school uniform- enough to put off anyone thinking today was a good day to report a truant, and she was in an awful hurry, too much of a hurry to wait around for a bus or a taxi; she marched down the Thames embankment, swift steps eating up the greyish-brown-unspeakable pavement, and entered the large government building without hesitation. The receptionist didn’t dare make a catty remark as she might have done normally; there was a nasty look in the girl’s eyes, hard and seething, like a wild animal in pain and ready to lash out, so she merely checked the pass the girl thrust out (ELIZABETH ALISON LESTER, date of birth, identity picture, bar code) and allowed her to put her fingers against the fingerprint scanner, which passed her and let her through the gate into the ARC.

 

            Liz Lester began to run.

 

            First to notice Liz was Connor Temple, but although he called out to her she didn’t stop, merely carried on. She hadn’t even heard him speak, she merely kept going until she found Jenny and seized her arm. “Jenny. Where’s my dad?”

 

            “Liz! Why aren’t you in school?”

 

            “Don’t ask. _Where’s my dad_?”

 

            Jenny shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. In his office? Out to lunch? Lyle would know.”  


            Liz did not relax. “Jon? Where is he?”

 

            “Soldiers’ rec room?” Jenny suggested, and provided Liz with directions, for which she got only hurried thanks before the teenager darted off again, vanishing around the corner and crashing down through the corridors of the ARC, scientists and civil servants alike flashing past. She almost overshot the rec room, but stopped herself by digging her heels in and grabbed the doorjamb, kicked the door open and snapped:

 

            “If anyone’s seen my dad or Jon, tell me now, tell me where, and don’t ask questions ’cause believe me _you do not want to know_.”

 

            There was a moment of puzzled silence, and then Tanya Lacey took the plunge. “Liz, what the hell’s happened, and why aren’t you at school?”

           

            “Fuck school!” Liz snarled. “This is more important.”

 

            Several confused glances were shared, and the soldiers who didn’t know Liz by sight looked rather offended. “Liz, take a breath and tell us what’s happening,” Ditzy advised.

 

            Liz scowled thunderously at him, but obeyed, leaning against the doorjamb, closing her eyes and taking several deep breaths before opening her eyes, fixing them on a patch of blank wall, and saying in a voice boiling with impotent fury: “Jamie’s dying. Jamie. My little brother. He’s _dying_ and there’s nothing I can fucking do about it, and I need to find my father to tell him so tell me where he is, _now_.”

 

            Silence fell like a block of ice-cold granite.

 

            “In his office, I think,” Captain Jacobs said eventually, taking his feet uneasily off the coffee table and leaning his elbows on his knees. “But he’s with-“

 

            “I don’t care,” Liz said with a tone bordering on the hysterical, “if he’s with the Queen of Sheba, although if he is, I’ll be asking some very puzzled questions about his sexuality. Just tell me where his office is.”

 

            Captain Jacobs told her.

 

            “Thank you,” Liz said politely, and then she was gone, the only thing to show she had been there the door hanging wide open and the sound of her receding footsteps as she sprinted office-wards.

 

            There was a silence.

 

            “Who was that?” Matt Rees, who had not previously encountered Liz, demanded.

 

            “Liz Lester,” Lacey answered.

 

            “Lester’s kid? She doesn’t look much like him.”

 

            “Spend more than five minutes in her company and she’ll start to,” Tremayne said, in a tone that suggested that now was not the time for a detailed discussion of Liz’s looks and character. She  knew Liz, a little, but she also knew that Lacey was closer to Liz, and Lacey had just thrown her a look that said _I’ve never seen that before_.

 

            “I didn’t know she had a brother,” Lacey remarked softly.

 

            “Obviously she does,” Tremayne replied, shrugging, and then repeated Liz’s words: “Dying- and there’s nothing she can fucking do about it... Shit.”

 

            “Seconded,” Lacey said, and then she was quiet too. Nobody wanted to talk.

 

***

 

            Liz sprinted through the corridors of the ARC, scattered a group of accountants like bowling pins, and skidded into her father’s secretary’s office. “Hi. Dad in?”

 

            “Yes,” Mrs. Chapman said, uncomfortably aware that Lieutenant Lyle was also in, and added, “But I wouldn’t disturb him, he’s with Lieute-“

 

            Liz paid her no attention, barged straight up to the door and knocked on it in a business-like fashion. “Make yourselves decent!” she yelled. “’Cause I’m coming in! I’ll give you five! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Ready or not, here I-“

 

            Lyle yanked the door open, looking slightly ruffled, rather well-kissed and extremely annoyed. “Liz, what the f-“

 

            Liz elbowed her way past him, too wound up to care about how angry Lyle was getting, and snapped: “Shut the door.”

 

            “Liz-“ Lester began, rising from his seat, a furious look in his eyes which any other day would at least have made her pause for thought, but Liz cut him off ruthlessly.

 

            “Sit down,” she ordered, and seized a chair for herself. “I’ve just come from the hospital.”

 

            Lyle watched all the fight drain out of Lester, and took a chair himself as Lester collapsed back into his own. “And?” Lester wanted to know, his eyes never leaving his daughter’s.

 

            “It’s official,” Liz said grimly, her voice hard and nasty, but its venom not directed at her father. “Jamie’s dying. And he wants to give in to it.”

 

            Lester looked as if he was going to faint for a moment, all the colour gone from his face.

 

            “You can see it in his eyes.” Liz was too far gone to realise the effect she was having on the other two. “He’s thrown in the fucking towel. He’ll be telling us he’s decided to stop his medication within the next three days, I know it, and when he stops the medication, he’ll be dead within two days after th-“

 

            “Liz, shut the fuck up,” Lyle snarled, going over to Lester, who looked drained, slumped in his chair, hands covering his face.

 

            Liz opened her mouth to say something, and then caught sight of her father’s destroyed posture and sighed. It was half a sob. “Oh, God. My temper... When I get going...”

 

            “I know,” Lyle said more gently, without looking at her. “Go and find Ditzy. Oh, and...” He rifled quickly through Lester’s suit jacket pockets, producing a sleek BlackBerry, which he lobbed at Liz, who caught it neatly. “Take that.”

 

            Liz nodded, and stuffed it into a pocket, then set off again, back to the rec room.

 

            This time, she didn’t herald her appearance with running footsteps and a door being kicked open, but knocked. “Hi. Me again. Anyone seen Ditzy?” she enquired briefly.

 

            Lacey got up. “Gym. I’ll show you.”

 

            “Last I checked I could follow directions quite competently,” Liz said, her tone almost a warning. _Stay out of this_ \- or possibly even _You won’t like me when I’m angry_.

 

            Lacey met her eyes evenly. _You may act like a little sister, but that makes me big sister, and I can take you any day._ “Last I checked, you never swore in front of people you didn’t know and you never looked like you could punch a wall in.”

 

            Liz relaxed a little more, and half-laughed, scrubbing her eyes with her fists. “Today I could.”

 

            Lacey merely nodded, put her empty cup down and got up. “I can believe that.”

 

            She walked down the corridor, Liz keeping in step with her, and stopped at the corner. Liz stopped too. “I’m sorry about your brother,” Lacey said quietly. “I didn’t know you had one.”

 

            Liz nodded, teeth clenched and the corners of her mouth turned down. “His name is Jamie. He’s two years younger than me.”

 

            “Tell me about him,” Lacey suggested as she started walking again. It was quieter down here than in some of the corridors of the ARC; many of the people in Accounts and Admin were petrified of venturing near the soldiers’ rec room, which contained unpredictable people with lots of weaponry, and Physics usually kept itself to itself, since discussion of the finer points of the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment was lost on most of the rest of the ARC- Anna Cheong, someone Lacey knew pretty well through Jenny and Abby, was a rare exception, but then her boyfriend Ciarán worked in a field team and Anna herself studied the anomalies close to so she wasn’t a typical physicist.

 

            Liz took a deep breath. “Not now. When I’m less... angry. Is there a punchbag in the gym?”

 

            “Yeah. Why?”

 

            “Because I’m furious, and I need to hit something soon, and if it’s not going to be a wall it ought to be a punchbag.”

 

            “You don’t look as angry as you did before,” Lacey commented cautiously, making a sharp right-hand turn.

 

            “That’s because Jon made me realise I was taking it out on everyone else and told me to shut the fuck up.”

 

            Lacey pushed the door to the gym open, and found Ditzy, plugged into an mp3 player and on a rowing machine, though he stopped rowing and took out one earphone when Liz and Lacey came in. “Who’s hurt?” he said resignedly.

 

            “My brother Jamie is dying and Dad’s taking it badly,” Liz said baldly, face closed off. The fury she felt at this had been plain to see before; now it had vanished behind a kind of mask, with the occasional gaping crack.

 

            Ditzy stared at her, and tactlessly asked the question that would be the obvious first query only to a medic. “What of?”

 

            Liz matched him stare for stare. “Leukaemia. Jon sent me to fetch you.”

 

            “Where are they?” Ditzy demanded, disentangling himself from the mp3 player cord hurriedly.

 

            “Dad’s office,” Liz said, and watched him leave. Then she turned to Lacey. “Are you staying?”

 

            Lacey nodded, and sat down on a bench usually used for the more tortuous kind of muscle-stretch and looked on as Liz removed her jacket and rucksack, dumping them carelessly on the floor, and took off bright green Converse trainers and socks, then padded towards the nearest punchbag. The girl curled her hands into fists, stood stone-still for a moment, and then hit out.

 

            Watching, Lacey felt very sorry for the punchbag. Liz was punching seven kinds of hell out of it, in a fashion Lacey was fairly sure fifteen-year-olds were not supposed to be able to; she wondered if Liz took some kind of martial arts lessons, and decided that the answer was almost certainly yes.

 

            Liz herself focussed only on the punchbag and the next blow, feeling the impotent rage working off slowly. _Forget about Lacey, observing. Forget about Jamie, dying. Forget about Dad, heartbroken- just be angry and get it over with_. Punch. Hit.

 

            She paused briefly after a while, breathing a little heavily, and said: “Still want to hear about my brother?”

 

            “Yes,” Lacey said, drawing her feet up onto the bench and leaning against the wall.

 

            Liz delivered a vicious uppercut to the punchbag. “His name’s Jamie; he’s thirteen.” She halted as if considering something, then attempted a kickboxing move which went awry, scowled, and tried it again until she got it right; Abby made it look so easy it was hugely irritating when she got it wrong. “But you knew that already... He loves to draw.”

 

            Thump.

 

            “He’s always-“ punch- “had leukaemia-“ kick- “ever-“ hit- “since-“ thwack- “I can remember.”

 

            She circled slightly, scowling intently at the blameless punchbag. “I can protect him from everything else. Bullies- my other brother- mean kids- stupid grownups-“ She punctuated every phrase with another blow to the punchbag. “I always have.” Thump. “Always.”

 

            “But I can’t save him from- leukaemia.” Her voice cracked painfully, and she bestowed a particularly vehement blow on the punchbag. “I- can try- but... I can’t.”

 

            She dropped her fists and squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again and began to hit the punchbag once more, feet slapping on the mat beneath as she shifted position. “I can’t do a thing. Not. A. Thing. Four times into remission. More lives than a cat, the doctors said.” Hit. “And he’s dying and he’s my brother and I love him and _it’s not fair_!”

           

            Liz’s voice rose to a wail, and she collapsed to her knees, hands going to cover her face, shoulders shaking as she began to cry, punchbag swinging gently beside her as it lost momentum. Lacey slipped off the bench and knelt beside the girl, putting her arms around her and whispering something meaningless.

 

            Mary Tremayne entered quietly, and took in the scene; then she went to stand where Lacey could see her face, and mouthed as clearly as possible: _I see it’s all gone to hell_.

 

            She was obliged to repeat it for Lacey, who didn’t quite catch on the first time, but then Lacey nodded and shrugged. _More or less._


	2. Chapter 2

 “James. James.” Lyle shook Lester’s shoulder anxiously, and then as the door opened his head shot up and he started on a furious glare, which faded away when he realised it was only Ditzy. “About bloody time too, mate.”

 

Ditzy let that slide, shutting the door quietly behind him. “What happened?”

 

“Liz told him- the kid’s simmering, I can see that, but that was fucking tactless of her –and he just... went quiet.” Lyle was frowning, uncharacteristically signposting his nervousness.

 

“Shock,” Ditzy diagnosed laconically after a few moments, stuck his head out of the office, and yelled a few orders involving sweet tea, followed by a few brisk qualifications intended to persuade a recalcitrant young accountant to do as he was damn well told.

 

Behind him, James Lester stirred. He was very pale, and his hand shook slightly as he reached out to take Lyle’s hand. He looked exhausted. “It shouldn’t have been a shock,” he said, his voice quiet and broken. “I knew Jamie’s chances of survival were small.”

 

Lyle put an arm around him, solid and comforting, and Lester leaned against him. “How the hell was it supposed not to have been?”

 

“Four times out of remission? How likely was it that Jamie would ever see eighteen?” Lester said sharply, spirit making an appearance.

 

Both Ditzy and Lyle were silent.

 

The tea arrived. “Sip it slowly,” Ditzy advised, shutting the door firmly on a highly interested young civil servant who wanted to know exactly what was going on. He handed Lester the cardboard cup. “It’s hot.”

 

More silence. Then Lyle, trying to find a way out of the situation, asked: “Are you sure he won’t recover?”

 

Lester nodded. “Liz is convinced.” His voice choked slightly, and he forced it to be steady. “About Jamie, Liz has rarely been wrong. She’s seen every new attack of leukaemia coming except the latest, predicted every recovery... they’re very close.” He closed his eyes. “I knew it was coming. I _knew_.”

 

Ditzy noticed to his horror that tears were leaking out of Lester’s eyes, and got up hurriedly. “I’ll go and check on Liz- hopefully Lacey’s stopped her breaking anything.”

 

“Do that,” Lyle recommended without looking at his friend, and Ditzy left quickly, the door banging shut behind him.

 

Lyle took the hot tea away from Lester and put it down on the desk. James, like Liz, loathed tea; it was a sign of how broken he was that he was actually drinking it. He put his arms around the older man, Lester’s tears soaking a damp patch in his t-shirt. “Shh,” he whispered uselessly, “shh,” and listened to the sound of Lester’s heart breaking.

 

He knew Jamie, a little. The boy’s fragility disconcerted him, brown eyes huge in the pale tired face, the stark contrast between Liz’s strength and Jamie’s lack of it. Jamie and Lester shared a sense of humour, and there was a kind of compassion common to them both that Jamie, unlike Lester, never hid; the similarities and the differences were plain to see. It was easy to care about Jamie. And nobody deserved to die at thirteen.

 

It took him a moment to realise that he, just like everyone else, was automatically accepting Liz’s judgement.

 

***

 

Liz sniffed disconsolately and extracted herself from Lacey’s embrace; Lacey sat back on her heels and looked at her, and Tremayne stood warily in the doorway, trying to be inconspicuous.

 

Liz raised her eyebrows at them, but said nothing, tugging her shoes and socks on without a word, and collecting jacket and bag from the floor.

 

“Feeling better?” Tremayne asked neutrally, not moving.

 

“Much, thank you.” Liz wiped her nose on her sleeve, and Tremayne winced and fished a tissue out of her pocket, handing it to her. Liz nodded in thanks and blew her nose.

 

Lacey looked at her watch and straightened up. “S’a quarter past two,” she remarked carefully. “Have you had anything to eat since breakfast?”

 

Liz blinked owlishly at her and sniffled again. “Didn’t have breakfast.”

 

Both women looked very disapproving. “Why the hell not?” Lacey demanded.

 

“Felt wrong.” Liz shrugged. “I know why now, don’t I?”

 

“Oh God, more ESP,” Tremayne groaned. It was either an effort to change the subject, in which case she was an excellent actress, or Lyle and his reliance on his thumbs got to her more than anyone had thought. “I can just about cope with Lyle and his prickly thumbs, but this takes the cake.”

 

“ESP? What, English Second Priority?” Liz said, a glimmer of humour showing through the mess of emotion on her face.

 

Tremayne flipped her the bird and performed a bad imitation of a cymbal rim-shot. “Ba-doom-boom _tsh_. No, you dipstick, Extra-Sensory Perception.”

 

Lacey’s stomach rumbled. Liz giggled waterily, and was flipped the bird for the second time in as many minutes. “I’m hungry, anyway,” Lacey said firmly. “Let’s go out and get something to eat.”

 

Surprisingly, Liz shook her head. “There’s a kitchen here, isn’t there?”

 

“Yes,” Tremayne said, getting out of the doorway.

 

“Got any burning objections to Croque Madames?”

 

“What are those when they’re at home?” Lacey demanded, flicking off the lightswitch in the gym.

 

“Cheese and ham toasties with egg on top,” Liz explained. She and Tremayne were already halfway down the corridor; Lacey caught up with them.

 

            “Sounds good to me. I think everything for that’ll be in the kitchen,” Lacey contributed, covertly examining Liz’s face for signs of more impending breakdown. The girl looked as if she’d calmed down a little and brought herself under control, for which Lacey was extremely thankful. She still seemed fragile, though.

 

            “Good,” Liz said firmly. She’d cooked for J- for her brother before –she even shied away from thinking his name- but nothing involving cheese; he hated it. There should be nothing in making lunch to remind her of him, and that was probably a good thing.

 

            She followed Lacey and Tremayne back to the rec room, which had mysteriously emptied. Lacey looked around, and laughed shortly. “Something funny?” Liz asked.

 

            “They’ve all scrambled. They must be scared of you, Liz,” Lacey said, offering Liz a careful grin.

 

            “They’d not be too far off,” Liz said, making a bee-line for the small kitchen and ransacking the fridge and cupboards. “Good, you have a grill.”

 

            “You told them to bugger off?” Lacey murmured in Tremayne’s ear.

 

            Tremayne shook her head, and muttered, “Liz spooked them.”

 

            “Fair enough. She spooks me in this mood.” Neither of them felt the need to say that it was probably not so much Liz who’d upset the Special Forces’ delicate internal balance as the mention of her dying little brother; there was something very wrong about a child facing death.

 

            Tremayne hummed neutrally, and watched as Liz started to cook, stretching up on tiptoes to reach the highest cupboards, checking the date on a half-empty box of eggs, switching on the grill, which crackled reluctantly into life. She looked used to this, and Tremayne said so.

 

            “I am,” Liz said, mind more than half on the progress of lunch, which helped her to discuss touchy subjects like her family in much the same way the punchbag had helped her talk about Jamie. “Dad can’t really cook.”

 

            It had never crossed either Lacey or Tremayne’s mind that Lester would be able to cook, but the reverse had not occurred to them either. In fact, they were more used to thinking of Lester in comfortably inhumane terms, which made it easier to mock him, but they weren’t going to admit that to his spitfire of a daughter, particularly not when her much-loved little brother was apparently dying. Neither of them said anything in response to Liz’s remark, and it was at this point that Ditzy appeared in the doorway and summoned Lacey silently enough that Liz, absorbed in eyeing a frying pan with some caution and wondering whether it needed scrubbing, didn’t notice.

 

            Ditzy and Lacey retired to the end of the corridor, and Ditzy jerked his head in Liz’s direction and murmured quietly: “Is she better, now?”

 

            Lacey opened her mouth as if to speak, and then reconsidered. “I don’t think so. But she’s hiding it very well.”

 

            Ditzy sighed. “Lester isn’t.”

 

            “Shall we just say they’re both a mess and have done with it, sir? Liz’s... sad and angry. I thought she was going to haul off and hit someone for a while there.” Ditzy’s eyebrows shot up, and Lacey hastily amended this. “She won’t now, but I thought she was going to. She might again, if someone makes her angry.”

 

            “Oh.” The medic paused. “Did she tell you what’s the matter with her brother?”

 

            “Leukaemia,” Lacey said briefly.

 

            Ditzy whistled softly. “And Lester said this was his fourth time out of remission. Kid must be tough.”

 

            “Liz loves him very much.”

 

            “Hm.” Ditzy was silent for a moment, and then said: “What’s she doing now?”

 

            “Making lunch.” Lacey’s tone said ‘believe it or not’; her face was quite wooden.

 

            Ditzy didn’t waste time saying he was surprised, but went back to the rec room and looked in. Tremayne had not tried to talk to Liz, who was efficiently making several of what looked to Ditzy like cheese toasties with menaces in a fashion which did not encourage conversation. “Liz?”

 

            “Moment,” Liz said briefly, and cracked an egg briskly into the frying pan, where it sizzled merrily. “Yes? Hi, Ditzy.”

 

            “I’ve seen your father,” Ditzy said. “He’s had a shock, but he’ll be all right.”

 

            You’d have had to have watched her pretty closely to see it, but Liz’s hands checked for a moment and she swallowed hard. “Good. Jon’ll look after him.” She rinsed her hands of egg white, fished three presentable plates out of the cupboard and slid each glorified cheese toastie onto a plate, hissing softly as the hot cheese burnt her fingers.

 

            “You’re managing well yourself.”

 

            “Thank you.” Clearly, if they were going to play at stonewalling each other, Liz wasn’t going to be a pushover.

 

            “Does your mother know your brother’s...”

 

            “-Dying?” Liz’s voice took on a hard edge as she said the word, and lost it only slowly. “Good question. Probably, yes. Lacey, how do you like your fried eggs?”

 

            Lacey peered over her shoulder. “Like that.”

 

            “Good.” Liz picked up a battered and disreputable spatula she’d used before (honestly, none of the three soldiers had had any idea that the kitchen actually contained that many usable utensils) and slipped the egg on top of one of the toasties and handed the plate over to Lacey.

 

            “I didn’t know you could cook,” Tremayne remarked, perched on the back of a sofa and swinging one foot idly.

 

            Liz smiled slightly, and cracked another egg into the frying pan. “I have to. Dad can’t cook anything more complicated than spaghetti carbonara.”

 

            Ditzy folded his arms, unamused. He’d been dismissed, it seemed; he was now being skilfully ignored. He decided to try and break into the conversation again. “Liz, who told you your brother was dying?”

 

            A hiss of pain, an explosive swearword, and Liz turned, sucking the burnt finger and scowling ferociously at Ditzy.

 

            “Running water,” Ditzy ordered, and grumpily Liz went over to the sink and ran the finger under cold water, one eye still on the frying pan.

 

            “Doctors are tactless and my hearing’s excellent,” she said finally, distinct hostility in her voice. “And once I heard, I knew he was sinking. Let’s not discuss my family further, or I’ll lose my temper again, and I think I already have some apologising to do.” She turned off the tap and prodded the frying egg with the spatula. “Tremayne, this about right?”

 

            “Yeah,” Tremayne answered, and accepted the plate thrust at her. Lacey was already eating, correctly judging that if she was called on to speak, her mouth being full of cheese, ham and egg would give her plenty of time to think.

 

            Ditzy decided to let it go, and left, resolving to have a quiet word with Jenny Lewis, who would be able to keep Professor Cutter in line; the wrong words spoken to Lester or his daughter could be bloody dangerous at this juncture, in his professional opinion, and while Temple was more tactless than the Professor, Abby always had him in charge. He also decided to hunt down the rest of the soldiers, who he suspected had decamped to the firing range.

 

            Liz slid her fried egg onto the ham and cheese toastie and went to sit down with the others. It was strange; she liked this kind of food, but it didn’t taste like much now. She wondered briefly whether her father was all right, and then remembered that Jon would be with him. He’d be all right.

 

            She swallowed mechanically and took another bite, thinking hard. Lacey and Tremayne appeared to be holding a slightly stilted conversation over her head; that was fine, it allowed her time to work this out. It didn’t look like anyone was going to be telling her what to do next, after all.

 

            There was no way out of this: Jamie was dying. But she wasn’t just going to let him slip through her fingers, because she was his big sister, and big sisters don't do that to their little brothers.


	3. Chapter 3

            By the time Liz had finished her food, everybody knew something terrible had happened to Lester’s family, but only a very few knew what, so Anna Cheong, the nearest person to hand when Lyle stuck his head out of Lester’s office, looking for a messenger to find Liz, was naturally very curious about the reasons why she had to take a message to Lester’s teenaged daughter. Being Anna, she denied it, and put on a veneer of mild annoyance at the summons, gulping down the rest of the water she’d just taken from the nearby watercooler and walking calmly over to ask who, exactly, she was supposed to find.

 

            Lyle stared hard at the young woman. He knew Anna was an active physicist, working with the new field team composed of her, that friend of Connor’s who liked diving so much and Dr. Williams, who was (according to Blade, who had been privileged to overhear an outburst) extraordinarily knowledgeable in the area of Welsh swearwords. Apart from that, he knew very little about the young physicist, and he didn’t much like her casual attitude.

 

            He gave Liz’s name again, and suggested her probable whereabouts; added a description and a warning not to antagonise her for good measure. Anna nodded intelligently, and began to walk away at a leisurely pace. He called a suggestion that she get a move on, and was rewarded by a rather disdainful glance – _all right, I’m going, I’m going_ \- and a slight quickening in Anna’s footsteps- not much, though.

 

            Lyle muttered something rude, and ducked back into the office, reaching Lester again quickly and running reassuring fingers through the other man’s short brown hair, his hand sliding down to caress the back of Lester’s neck. “I’ve sent someone to fetch Liz.”

 

            “Thank you.” Lester’s voice was rough from crying. Lyle had never seen him break down like that; he never wanted to again, but suspected he would have to.

 

            “That damn’ scientist had better shift her arse,” he said aloud, combing his fingers through Lester’s hair as the man leant against him. “She was strolling along like it was a day at the bloody beach.”

 

            “Who did you send?” Lester was beginning to rouse himself, forcing himself to take an interest. A good sign? Lyle hoped so.

 

             “That physicist woman. The one who’s part of the new second team... Anna something.”

 

            “Oh yes... Anna Cheong. I see you didn’t take to her.”

 

            “I didn’t. Christ, didn’t she know it was _important_?”

 

            “She probably did,” Lester said dryly. “Miss Cheong likes to pretend that she’s not interested in things which aren’t relatively intellectual.”

 

Lyle made an enquiring noise, stroking his thumb over Lester’s cheekbone. This was a very odd discussion, but it seemed to be providing an adequate distraction.

 

Lester correctly translated the noise as ‘how do you know that?’’ and answered. “I had an instructive chat with Dr. Williams, who is to Miss Cheong and Mr. O’Murphy –the other member of the team- more or less what Professor Cutter is to Mr. Hart and Mr. Temple, except I consider it highly unlikely that Mr. O’Murphy ever slept with Dr. Williams’ fiancé.”

 

            “Tegan has a fiancé?” Lyle asked, trying to pick leading questions. He knew more about the new palaeontologist than he did about Anna Cheong and Ciarán O’Murphy, she’d been introduced to him as the leader of a second team and immediately requested him and most of her other new colleagues to call her Tegan, but it couldn’t hurt to hear a little more.

 

            “She _used_ to have a fiancé; Dr. Michael Tennant, a physics teacher at the same university she worked at. Her first run-in with the ARC involved the unexpected appearance of a Gastornis on campus, and the equally unexpected death of Dr. Tennant.”

 

            Lyle whistled. “I had no idea.”

 

            Lester was silent, an odd look on his face, and then he said haltingly, “I gave her my condolences- later, after, when we chased her up to make her sign the Act- you would have been amused, Mr. O’Murphy was standing ominously in the doorway all the time- and she just looked at me... and she said _..._ said- ‘I hope... I hope you never have to live with that kind of pain.’”  

           

            Lyle put an arm around him, and Lester leaned into the embrace, closing his eyes and resting his head against Lyle’s chest.

           

***

 

            When Anna Cheong reached the soldiers’ rec room, she found that Liz had stacked the plates neatly by the sink and was now sitting on one of the sofas, texting someone, while Lacey and Tremayne carried on a quiet conversation, always keeping an eye on Liz. Only one of the soldiers had returned to the rec room, probably to take advantage of the wi-fi hotspot; he appeared to be deeply engrossed in a hushed Skype chat with one of his relatives. Anna wasn’t often down near the rec room, but even she guessed it was too quiet in there.

 

            She coughed tactfully. “Excuse me, I’m looking for Liz Lester.”

 

            “You’ve found her,” Liz said in a highly uncooperative tone, finishing her text to Juliet and only then turning to look at Anna. “What is it?”

 

            “Lieutenant Lyle wants you to go up to your father’s office,” Anna said, a little nettled by Liz’s tone.

 

            “Oh,” Liz said quietly. “Thanks.” She turned away again and started to put away her mobile and wrap up her iPod to put that away as well, and paid Anna no further attention. Anna hovered in the door for a minute, wondering what she should do next and getting more and more nettled by the minute, before an almost silent discussion between the two female soldiers ended in both Tremayne and Lacey giving her a clear ‘why are you still here?’ look, and she left, feeling slightly insulted.

 

Lacey rose from her seat and asked Liz: “D’you want me to go with you up to your dad’s office?”

 

Liz opened her mouth to refuse, and then hesitated and replied: “Yes, please."

 

Lacey waited for Liz to get up, and then went with her along the –admittedly rather featureless- corridors of the ARC, neither of them saying anything. Liz didn’t seem to want conversation, and all things considered, Lacey wasn’t sure there was anything to say, so she occupied herself by firing evil glares at the people who stared and whispered when they saw Liz, head down, looking so broken it made Lacey’s heart ache in sympathy. Bloody technicians- accountants- civil servants, why did they all have to stare at the poor kid? At least Cutter and Temple, probably influenced by Abby and Miss Lewis, had both suffered an attack of tactfulness and didn’t stare or whisper or even look up as Liz and Lacey passed them.

 

They stopped outside the door to Lester’s office, and for the first time Liz looked up at Lacey. Lacey clapped her on the back, the only sympathetic gesture that seemed appropriate, and was then severely startled but not displeased, when Liz suddenly hugged her tightly and whispered ‘thank you’, face crushed against the older woman’s black jacket. Lacey hugged her back briefly, but then Liz stepped back, sniffing a little and wiping her eyes free of tears, and offered Lacey a small, slightly embarrassed smile. “And will you tell Tremayne thank you too?” she asked, and Lacey nodded, smiling back at her.

 

“’Course.”

 

“Thanks,” Liz said, and then slipped into Lester’s office, the heavy door closing behind her.

 

Lacey stuffed her hands in her pockets, and began to wander back down to the rec room.

 

***

 

“I’m sorry,” Liz blurted, “I shouldn’t have just... spat it out like that, I should have been more...”

 

Lester made a vague gesture with one hand that said quite clearly, _don’t fret about it_ , but Liz glanced at Lyle, and was relieved to see his face soften. “Sit down,” Lyle suggested, and Liz did, choosing the black leather computer chair on the other side of her father’s desk and leaning her elbows on the table.

 

“So what happens now?” Lyle enquired. “I’m a little out of the loop, here.”

 

Liz collected her thoughts, and said uncertainly, “We wait, I think, for Jamie to gather us all together and tell us what he wants... he knows he’s...” There was a stubborn blockage in her throat, but she wrestled the word over it. “... dying.” Her eyes on Lester’s face, she saw him bite his lip hard, and Lyle’s arm tighten around his shoulders, but she took a ragged breath and persisted. “He’ll want to die with dignity. He won’t want to hang around, desperately clinging to life, he’s had years of that. And he’ll make the choices that mean he can let it end, he’ll have his medication ended.”

 

She caught Lyle’s eye, but he nodded. _Keep going_.

 

Liz swallowed. “We have to support him. Mum will... cling. Nicky will be no help. He has to be allowed to let go, do you see? It’s been- Dad, you know him like I know him, you know he wants to give up, think about it, really think- we can’t let Mum take a high hand on this because she thinks Jamie can’t understand what it means to die when he knows better than any of us!”

 

Her father’s eyes were closed, but his voice shook only a little. “What makes you think I don’t agree with your mother?”

 

“Because you know him better than she does. No...” Liz flailed for words, and they rushed out. “You understand him better. I think, you know what I think? Mum doesn’t _try_ to understand him- she looks at Jamie and she sees just her son, she sees a child and he’s _not_ a child, Dad, I don’t think he ever has been... Dad-“ she leaned over the desk to touch her father’s cheek, to make him open his eyes and look at her- “Dad,” she repeated, her voice breaking and tears coming back to her eyes now- “Jamie _deserves_ to make this choice.”

 

She could feel Lyle looking at her, radiating muted approval the same way he had when she’d done what was, according to him, her first ‘real bastard’ of a caving trip without complaining once, but Lester’s eyes were open now and she couldn’t look away from him, and what she’d just said burnt her like salt water on a raw wound. She blinked, and tears began to well out of the corners of her eyes again.

 

Lester just nodded, and then he had to look away, lips pressing together.

 

For some reason, a memory floated into Jon Lyle’s mind from months before, of when Liz had been helping the Drama Department shift scenery and had managed to concuss herself, and he and Lester had gone to the hospital and found Juliet Sayers holding Liz’s hand. She’d smiled at him, flicking long blonde hair over her shoulder as her blue eyes glittered with mischief, and cracked a joke. _These Lesters, they just can’t look after themselves_ , she’d said, and kissed Liz’s forehead.

 

They’d all laughed, but no-one was laughing now.

 

***

 

After a while, Liz said, “Right, then.”

 

This was enough of a non-sequitur that both Lyle and Lester stared at her. Her hands had clenched into white-knuckled fists, and she was wearing what Lester identified as her Bloody Stubborn face. She stood up, and slung her rucksack onto her back. “I’m going back to the h- to the hospital, to read to Jamie. Dad, will you ring school... tell them... tell them- what’s... happening...”

 

“Of course.” Lester seemed to take some strength from his daughter’s show of resolution and sat up straight, clapping his hands briskly together and wincing as if the sound hurt him. To Lyle, it looked as if they were both lying to protect themselves from breaking down again; well, to each their own.

 

Liz dug up a smile from somewhere and offered it to her father, who managed one in return; she stepped round the desk and hugged him and then Lyle, and stepped back again.

 

“I love you,” she said, and meant it.

 

“If they kick you out before we come to pick you up, come back to the ARC,” Lyle said. “There might be a shout on and we might not be here, but someone’ll be around and you’ve got the pass to let you in.”

 

She nodded, and then went out of the room, out of the ARC, and caught a very slow bus to the hospital.

 

 

The nurses were a little surprised to see her again, but she smiled and lied that she had a half day at school and she’d time on her hands, so she thought she’d spend it with her brother. They were glad enough to let her through to Jamie’s bedside; they were aware that the doctors gave the boy a tiny to nil chance of survival now, and some of the longer ones knew his history and had seen him in the ward before, being read to by his big sister, drawing and sketching, the big brown eyes never losing their laughter, the lively hint of mockery.

 

“Liz!” Jamie’s face burst into a welcoming smile as she walked towards him. “I thought you had to go back to school!”

 

“Half day,” Liz grinned for the nurses’ benefit. “I only remembered after I’d gone, so I came back.”

 

Jamie took in her expression and the faint hint of redness around her eyes, and his face blazed with sudden understanding- he knew something was wrong, he just didn’t know what. He sat up straight, and asked more quietly- “Liz, what’s the matter?”

 

“I came back to read to you. It’s okay, I’m covered. I don’t want to...” Liz hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “...waste time.”

 

Her brother’s eyes sharpened further, and a kind of respect and sadness found its way onto his face. “Oh, _clever_ Liz,” he whispered.

 

“If I was clever,” Liz replied, looking at his pale skin, the tired circles under his eyes, the fine bones shining through, the way his eyes, just the same bright brown as hers, were the most colourful thing in his face, “I’d have known a long time ago.”

 

She cleared her throat, took out the copy of _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ , and flipped to the appropriate page while Jamie settled comfortably in his hospital bed, waiting for her to start reading. Liz had always read to him, in a ploy by their mother to make her read more fluently –Liz was a stubborn child, and one that refused to practise reading aloud until she realised that Jamie hung on her words and loved the voices she tried to give the characters; through Jamie, Liz could be made to do almost anything, and Liz could persuade Jamie into almost anything- it was a bond Kathy Burke had often wished her youngest son Nicky had with his brother and sister. The story was an escape for him, a door into a world where he could live happily ever after.

 

Jamie closed his eyes; oh, but he was tired. He was always tired now.

 

Liz’s voice rose and fell with the phrasing of the words, paused to breathe and rushed on in action, a quicksilver river of words that lifted and floated Jamie’s frail weight and carried him away; a river with no rocks to bruise him, and no currents to drag him under.


	4. Chapter 4

_“Jamie!”_

The voice was familiar. It sounded as if it was a long way away, but Jamie knew it well. That voice shouted, whispered, laughed and snickered through so many of his memories, but it was hard to place it now. Jamie stirred, and struggled to find the name; trying to think felt like wading through treacle.

_“Jamie!”_

_Liz._ Finally, he placed the voice, the imperative _come back to me_ tone.

 

Jamie broke the surface of the river of words with a shock and a reflexive gasp dragging air into his throat, his eyes flying open to find himself surrounded by doctors and nurses and- sharp elbows and well-aimed feet keeping her place among the crowd -Liz. The breath whistled in and out of his lungs, loud in his ears. “What- I-“

 

“You had the damned cheek to stop breathing!” Liz snapped, sounding remarkably like her father. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

 

“Um. Okay,” Jamie said, feeling strangely disappointed.

 

One of the nurses reached out and patted his askew cap neatly down. “You’re lucky you’ve got such a quick-thinking sister. She spotted you were going out almost before you were!” With a smile, she bustled away, as did a few others, except for a doctor or two, who lingered for a while, checking his pulse and now-steady breathing. Words were said, cautioning him or Liz to ask for help at once if Jamie felt any number of symptoms. Liz sat down again, nodded obediently to their instructions, and, like Jamie, waited for them to go away.

 

Eventually, they went. Jamie watched his sister’s face, brown eyes, firm chin and stubborn mouth, and imagined her counting to ten; right on cue, Liz drew her chair in a little, leaned over with a ferocious scowl on her face, and hissed: “Not yet, you fool.”

 

Jamie reflected that it would have been very nice to be able to raise an eyebrow at this point, but chemotherapy had seen off his eyebrows as well as his hair. Still, Liz got the message, and the scowl deepened.

 

“You want to die in peace, without the medicines? Fair enough. But don’t you dare slip away now... give us time to say goodbye.” She blinked once or twice; he could see the extra brightness of tears in her eyes. “For God’s sake, Jamie... give me time to say goodbye. I can let you die quietly, without fuss- or, or- medicine that just makes you sick- I understand- I can, I promise. But- please- let me say goodbye.”

 

“Of course. Of course,” Jamie said, startled by the open declaration of support for a plan he hadn’t even told her about- whether this was an upside or a downside to being so close to his sister, he didn’t know –and by the tears. He sat up and put his arms around her. “I didn’t mean to... I just slipped away, I felt sleepy.”

 

“You’re to tell me if you feel sleepy again,” Liz growled, hugging her brother fiercely and then extracting herself from the embrace. “The absolute moment, d’you hear me? And where did we get up to? What was the last thing you heard? I dropped the book...”

 

Outside, the doctors came to the decision that it was time to call Jamie Lester’s parents. The boy’s chances of survival were almost nil, and unpleasant as it was going to be they had to be told.

 

“It’s the girl I feel sorry for, even more than the boy,” one doctor said, glancing back through a large window at Liz, who was now reading in her clear, carrying reading-voice, Jamie watching her intently. “She’s his sister, isn’t she?”

 

“Yes,” said another doctor, one who’d treated Jamie before. “She’s very close to him, I think. What’s her name- Leslie? Isobel?- no, Liz.”

 

“Hm.” The first doctor tore his eyes away from the scene. “Anyway, we should ring his parents. Who’s in charge of his treatment?”

 

***

 

“As you can see- _Oh_ -!“ Dr. Williams said crossly as her PowerPoint died a messy death on the white screen, and added a string of incomprehensible but probably highly colourful Welsh. “Sorry, bloody thing was working five minutes ago.”

 

She frowned and prodded the laptop ineffectually. “Ciarán, Connor, you understand computers. Do something with this-“ Dr. Williams caught Lester’s eye, and rephrased- “ _thing_ for me, please.”

 

Connor and the second member of the new anomaly response team got up and went over, and started doing meaningful things to the laptop. Lester sighed quietly, and reflected that things never quite went to plan where the response teams were concerned; it must just be something intangible and disastrous about scientists. If it wasn’t Cutter behaving with his usual Scottish intransigency and maverick’s talent for going off on ludicrous tangents, it was Dr. Williams refereeing the Special Forces’ impromptu rugby matches and totally failing to acquire more than basic proficiency with a computer. Still, at least she, Ciarán O’Murphy and Anna Cheong were just as capable as Cutter, Connor Temple and Abby Maitland, and slightly less prone to emotional entanglements with Helen Cutter ( _blast the woman_ , he added automatically.)

 

Jenny had heard the sigh, and glanced quickly at him. He raised an eyebrow.

 

She raised both eyebrows -despite much practice, she had never managed to learn how to raise just the one- and murmured: “Lyle told me to keep an eye on you.”

 

Lester was having trouble deciding whether this was sweet of Lyle or not, and whether or not he should mention this to the man at the next opportunity, when Ciarán O’Murphy failed to manage the incorrigible laptop and an unspeakable oath filled the room. “Language, Mr. O’Murphy,” he said absently, and added more quietly to Jenny, “Thank you- I’m...” He hesitated. ‘All right’ would be a lie, and Jenny would know it quite well. “... managing,” he compromised.

 

She eyed him for a moment longer, and then nodded and returned to watching the amusing array of expressions pass over Connor’s friend’s face as he and Connor wrestled with the slideshow, which was supposed to be explaining a theory the response teams –or, to be more accurate, Connor, Anna and up to a point Ciarán, since it utterly bewildered everyone else- had about anomaly activity and whether or not it followed a pattern.

 

Lester’s BlackBerry rang, and he dug in his pocket for me. “Excuse me,” he said, and went outside to take the call.

 

The next thing anyone in the room knew was that Lester marched into the room, seized a couple of personal effects and excused himself, all with the most terrible expression on his face, and then marched out again. Everyone fell silent, Connor’s jaw dropped, and Caroline went saucer-eyed.

 

“Bugger,” Jenny said succinctly, and added, “Excuse me one moment.” She got up, and strode out herself, heading as fast as she could in three-inch heels for the most likely location of Lieutenant Lyle. She suspected he was going to be needed.

 

***

 

“Miss Lester,” a doctor said uncomfortably, hovering beside Liz. “If we could have a word-“

 

“-‘and Fred’s eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face’,” Liz persisted, keen to reach the end of the chapter. “Hi, Doctor Flaxman. What about?”

 

The doctor, an unfortunate man named Richard Flaxman who had children of his own at home and had desperately hoped he would be able to save Jamie (after all, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia had such a high cure rate in children!) squirmed, and cast a glance at Jamie. “Er.”

 

“If it’s about me dying,” Jamie rescued him, “Liz already knows.”

 

Liz’s jaw tightened, and her hands clenched on the covers of the book, but she kept herself under control, helped by the expression on Dr. Flaxman’s face- ‘poleaxed’ didn’t quite cover it. “Yeah. I...” She swallowed hard, and forced herself to relax her jaw to speak. “Uh. Doctor Flaxman?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Just... kind of.... warning... You’ve rung up my parents, haven’t you?”

 

Dr. Flaxman nodded.

 

“Well... they’re divorced- and Dad’s got a new partner, and, uh, he’s a guy and he’s probably coming too- yeah, I’d kind of appreciate it if fuss wasn’t made about that on the hospital side of things, ’cause he’s...”

 

“Part of the family,” Jamie supplied when his sister appeared to be struggling for ways in which to describe Jon Lyle’s relationship to the components of the Lester family that weren’t his boyfriend.

 

“-part of the family,” Liz said, reaching out to squeeze Jamie’s hand in silent thanks, “and Mum’s going to raise enough dust and drama for one afternoon without the NHS getting in on the act.”

 

“I see,” Dr. Flaxman said, and made a speedy escape.

 

Brother and sister were contemplatively quiet for a moment, and then Liz stirred and said: “I think we frightened him.”

 

Pause. “Does it matter?” Jamie asked.

 

“Probably not.” Liz opened the book again. “’Chapter thirty-two, The Elder Wand. The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant laid down their arms? Harry’s mind was in freefall, spinning out of control, unable to grasp the impossibility’...”


	5. Chapter 5

 

Liz had got as far as Ron, Harry and Hermione’s attempting to take shelter in the Whomping Willow when the doors opened and disgorged a boy of about eleven years old, with dark hair so long that it brushed his earlobes and mostly concealed his eyebrows, blue eyes, a slouch and a pre-emptive sulky expression.

 

“- ‘as the giant swung its club again and its bellows’- Christ on a Christmas tree, they let the brat in here?”

 

Regrettably, Liz’s voice took a few moments to scale down from the carrying reading tone, so the words ‘Christ on a Christmas’ rang merrily out through the ward, earning them disapproving stares. Liz and Jamie giggled guiltily, and Liz apologised to the nurses.

 

“Hello, Nicky,” Jamie said, smiling at his brother. “How’re you?”

 

“How come you’re not at school?” Liz demanded. Liz and Nicky had never got along particularly well. It might have had something to do with the fact that Liz had always suspected that their mother preferred her youngest son, her baby, and her sickly middle child on whose behalf she could crusade and who she could cosset, to Liz herself, who was robust, plain-spoken, and independent. Jamie counteracted this by being incredibly easygoing and having a peculiarly close sibling bond with Liz, but Nicky was pugnacious and had had a permanent disagreement running with Liz for some time- certainly since the Divorce, where Nicky had completely taken his mother’s side. Lester had considered this, and then come to the conclusion that Liz and Nicky just got under each other’s skin, and they would either grow out of it or throttle each other.

 

Nicky’s pre-emptive sulkiness transformed into a level two scowl. “I’m sick.”

 

Liz snorted. “You look well to me.” She leaned over and pressed the back of her hand against her brother’s forehead, despite his protesting yelp; the results were inconclusive, so she hummed sceptically, and Nicky scowled harder. Jamie cast his eyes heavenwards and settled in to listen to his brother and sister bicker. There was no point intervening in a minor scrap, but if it showed signs of escalating he would try and exercise some influence.

 

“I am too ill,” Nicky said defiantly. “I threw up yesterday night.”

 

“Okay, okay, you’re ill,” Liz conceded, and then eyed him narrowly, looking for signs of queasiness. He was pale, but that was all. “Don’t you dare be sick.”

 

“Not in here,” Jamie agreed, entering the conversation. “The nurses will _flip_.”

 

Nicky smiled slightly, involuntarily, and Liz grinned outright. Nicky had filched another visitors’ chair, and was sitting cross-legged on it. Jamie was fairly sure this was an extremely uncomfortable way to sit, but suspected that Nicky was doing it in order to be different in even a small way from his brother and sister, and decided not to comment.

 

The younger boy picked at a loose thread on his jeans, and then looked up with a frown. “Did you see the guy outside? Tall- dark hair- brown eyes. He looked tough, but he smiled at me like he was embarrassed. He was with Dad.”

 

“Jon managed to stick with him,” Liz said, half to herself and approvingly. “Good.”

 

“Wait, who’s Jon?” Nicky demanded, his eyes narrowing.

 

Jamie closed his eyes in resignation, and earned himself a stinging, but light slap on the wrist and a warning of “watch yourself” from Liz. He rolled his eyes at her, and reflected that there were better ways of introducing Nicky to the concept of his father having a boyfriend; he suspected that Nicky, who could be very impressionable, had picked up a lot of his notions from his mother- and Kathy had had trouble adapting to the idea of her daughter dating girls. What she, and by extension Nicky, would have to say on the subject of her ex-husband being gay just did not bear thinking about.

 

Liz ignored him. “Dad’s boyfriend. He’s cool. You’d like him, if you didn’t always think the way Mum tells you to.”

 

Nicky flushed dull red. “I don-“

 

Liz snorted, and Nicky opened his mouth, angry retort all lined up and ready to start a pitched battle.

 

“You two’re about as much fun as the average Hickman line when you bicker,” Jamie said conversationally, pitching his voice carefully in order to get through to both siblings. “Yes, Jon’s Dad’s boyfriend. He’s actually pretty cool, Nicky. I know all sorts of new swearwords now, even if caving doesn’t sound like it would be my thing even if I wasn’t sick.”

 

Liz and Nicky winced at exactly the same time. Jamie forbore to comment, and snapped his fingers at Liz. “Minion! Read!” he ordered, grinning.

 

Liz’s eyebrows shot up. “What did your last slave die of, sunshine?”

 

“But I thought Dad was straight,” Nicky complained, apparently still having trouble wrapping his mind around the concept.

 

“So he’s bi,” Liz snapped. “ _Such_ a big deal, I _don’t_ think.”

 

“Yeah, well, if he’s the reason Mum and Dad got divorced, it is a big deal!” Nicky retorted.

 

“He’s not,” Liz said curtly. “’S too recent. I checked.”

 

“But- Just.... I mean... Ew,” Nicky mumbled, face taking on a bemused and rather startled expression.

 

“What do you _mean_ ‘ew’?” Liz demanded, reaching the end of her patience with alarming rapidity. “What’s ‘ew’ about it? It just is, i-“

 

Jamie coughed tactfully. “Oi, you two. You’re getting noisier, and people are starting to stare.”

 

Liz quietened, but fixed Nicky with a ferocious glare and said: “Don’t you dare make a fuss, Nicks. You’ll just upset Dad, and they’re happy together. I haven’t seen Dad so happy for a long time. You never have, or at least you’re too young to remember. So don’t you dare try and screw things up for them, do you hear me?”

 

Nicky slumped in his seat and scowled, but didn’t say anything. Jamie waited until Liz had stopped glaring so nastily, then said plaintively: “Liz...”

 

“What?” she muttered, flicking absently through the book she was holding.

 

“Please read,” he said, giving her his best pleading expression.

 

“’Course,” Liz said, focussing on the page, realising how far off it was the one she ought to be reading from, and hurriedly flicking back. “Nicky, keep an eye on him, will you? If he looks tired or anything, say, he might be about to faint on us.”

 

“Okay,” Nicky said, swivelling awkwardly in his chair and looking hard at Jamie. Jamie stuck his tongue out at him, and Nicky giggled.

 

Liz cleared her throat, and began.

 

***

 

There was one word to describe this scene, Jon Lyle thought, and that was _awkward_.

 

Jenny Lewis had found him, twisting her ankle in the process, and he’d managed to catch Lester before he left the building and calm him a little (if you could apply the word ‘calm’ to pushing him against the wall and kissing him until the frightening unseeing look left his eyes) and drive them both to the hospital, although Lester had fought that one. Things had been all right after that, even when they got to the hospital, even though Lyle still didn’t like the look on Lester’s face and his thumbs were prickling fit to burst.

 

He had found out why they were prickling, of course, the moment they reached the leukaemia ward Jamie was in and the knot of doctors outside, where they’d found Kathy Burke. There had been a boy there as well- eleven or so, dark-haired –but he’d vanished into the hospital ward and Lyle had barely registered him: he’d been too busy looking at Kathy. He’d seen a picture of the woman, so he had thought that he knew roughly what to expect, but Kathy in the flesh was very different to Kathy in a picture. For one thing, she was of average height, but she projected a kind of presence that made her seem much taller, and you had only to look at her to understand where Jamie and Liz got their vivid brown eyes from. Her dark hair was cropped short, she wore a well-cut charcoal grey suit and a crisp white shirt, and looking at her also told Lyle exactly where Liz got the instinct to hit out when powerless that Lacey had described to him. She saw him, and he suffered under a fierce stare for a few moments before her eyes flicked to Lester.

 

“James,” she said, and he could hear roiling undercurrents of anger and helplessness in her voice. She didn’t seem to have Lester’s self control.

 

“Kathy,” Lester said.

 

Kathy nodded at Jon. “Friend or lover, James?”

 

She was dismissing Lyle by refusing to speak to him directly, and he didn’t like it. “Lover,” he said before Lester could say anything.

 

A flicker of respect shot unwillingly into the brown eyes, and then vanished. Lester coughed. “Now we have that sorted... I think the doctors have something to say to us.”

 

He turned to look at the knot of doctors, and Dr. Flaxman began. “Mr. Lester- Ms. Burke- er...”

 

“Lieutenant Lyle,” Lyle supplied, and had the satisfaction of seeing Kathy’s eyes widen in surprise.

 

“... Lieutenant, if you wouldn’t mind stepping this way- unless- Ah-“

 

The doctor was looking at him uncomfortably, and Lyle understood his point. He wasn’t family, as far as the NHS was concerned, so he couldn’t be involved in the technically confidential discussions. _Sod_ , he thought, but luckily a solution occurred to him.

 

“I’ll check on Liz,” he suggested, and reached out and squeezed Lester’s hand, catching his eye to make sure the message sank in. “You know where I am if you need me.”


	6. Chapter 6

Jon pushed open the door to the ward carefully; it swung forward to admit him with very little sound, and he looked around for Liz and Jamie.

 

They were easily seen; Jamie lying in a bed halfway down the ward, his head turned towards his sister, who was reading aloud to him from the seventh Harry Potter, voice sinking to an unholy half-hissing tone to approximate Lord Voldemort’s voice. “‘ _I have thought long and hard, Severus_...’”

 

There was silence in the entire ward, silence enough that even his quiet footsteps were loud enough to make the unfamiliar figure sitting facing Liz turn to look at him. Dark hair, thick and in need of cutting; startlingly familiar blue eyes, a blue and green striped jumper- it was the boy he’d glimpsed earlier, darting into the ward. Lyle had met and knew two out of three of Lester’s children, but this boy was only familiar from photographs: Nicky Lester.

 

Nicky Lester treated him to a brief scowl and turned back, but neither Liz nor Jamie seemed to notice that he was there until he stood right by the bed, a little distance from Nicky, who ignored him. Liz glanced up from the book and gave him a brief smile, then finished the paragraph. “‘ _No, my Lord, but I beg you will let me return. Let me find Potter._ ’ Hi, Jon,” she said more quietly. “Dad okay?”

 

Lyle shrugged. “A wreck, more or less, but better than he was.”

 

Liz nodded in satisfaction. “Good. You haven’t met Nicky,” she added, waving a hand at the younger boy, who picked at a loose thread on his jeans and mumbled something without looking up.

 

“Nicks,” Jamie said warningly.

 

Accepting the reprimand, Nicky glanced up and met Lyle’s eyes; he looked most like Lester superficially, Lyle thought, but if you spent a lot of time with him you’d probably find yourself noting all the ways the two weren’t alike. “Hi,” Nicky said grudgingly, and then turned back to dismantling the hem of his trousers.

 

Jamie cast his eyes heavenwards, but apparently accepted that that was the best he was going to get, and then sat up a little, looking round until he spotted a girl wearing a pink fleecy hat and squeezing a bag of something yellowish and squishy that Liz recognised as platelets, to which she was hooked up by a drip. “Laila,” he called. “Can Jon borrow your visitor’s chair?”

 

The girl nodded. “Sure, so long as your sister keeps reading.”

 

Liz grinned, and Lyle smiled and went over to borrow the chair. “Thanks,” he said. Laila shrugged.

 

“No problem.”

 

The soldier carried the chair back over to Jamie’s hospital bed, and –after some mental debate- sat next to Nicky, who paid him no attention. Liz looked back down at the book again, found her place, and started to read again.

 

“‘ _You sound like Lucius. Neither of you understands Potter as I do. He does not need finding_.”

 

Lyle looked at the children, trying to work out the differences and similarities, the clashes and alliances. James Lester had not spoken very often of Nicky, and Lyle got the impression that Nicky was frequently rude to his father, or argumentative, which hurt Lester: it probably had something to do with the divorce and a tendency on Nicky’s behalf to take his mother’s side. Although Jamie had always been careful to be fairly neutral about the entire thing, supporting neither one parent nor the other exclusively, Lyle had noticed that he was a natural born compromiser, and a better comparison for Nicky might be Liz, who wasn’t much of a compromiser, natural born or otherwise. Liz had been fairly open about the fact that she and her mother didn’t get along and never had done, and that she thought there had been less fault on her father’s side. Whether that was true or part of Liz’s loyalty to her father Lyle didn’t know, and suspected he would have to ask Jamie to find out. Liz had painted a picture of an angry woman who had grown frustrated by her husband’s attitude and refusal to talk to her about the job that kept him at work so late, and had attacked him, loudly and frequently- possibly unaware that Jamie’s bedroom was directly above the kitchen and therefore, soundproofing or no soundproofing, Jamie and often Liz heard every word. If Liz was an accurate reflection of her brother’s temperament in respect of her loyalty to one parent, and if he was right in thinking that Nicky took his mother’s side, then no wonder Nicky was hostile. After all, he was Kathy’s ex-husband’s boyfriend.

 

“‘ _Why did both the wands I have used fail when directed at Harry Potter?_ ’” Liz questioned, her voice idle, her eyes fixed on the book, and then her voice dropped to represent Severus Snape. “‘ _I- I cannot answer that, my Lord_.” She reached out, and took a sip from a bottle of water on Jamie’s bedside table- looked up, caught her brother’s eye, and smiled. He smiled back. It must be like looking in a mirror: exactly the same colour eyes.

 

“‘ _Can’t you?_ ’”

 

A return to the Voldemort-voice, and with it, what might be another answer to Lyle’s question: why was Nicky so different to his brother and sister? Nicky did not have a part in the close bond between Jamie and Liz, the automatic care for each other’s interests Lyle had seen before or the instinct for each other’s wellbeing. Lester had remarked, once or twice, that Liz when younger had been classed as an awkward child by her teachers on account of her oddly matched habits of politeness and getting into no-holds-barred fights with anyone who dared harm or mock Jamie, but Lyle imagined that Liz would leave Nicky to fend for himself, more or less. Possibly an evil glare out of brown eyes might warn anyone trying to bully Nicky off, but there would be no fights started because of a reflex that acted on Liz as powerfully as a knee-jerk reaction. It was possible that Liz’s intense loyalty to Jamie just didn’t apply to the younger brother; it would be like Liz to discount Nicky from her calculations as perfectly able to look after himself, or even forget that he might need caring for too. From there, it was no great step to imagine how quickly Nicky might become jealous, and turn eventually to being as able to care for himself as Liz assumed, and openly antagonistic towards the sister he thought didn’t care for him.

 

  “‘ _You killed Albus Dumbledore. While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot be truly mine._ ’” Liz cleared her throat, and glanced up as Nicky prodded Jamie with a frown. Jamie turned his head to look at his brother, and smiled, squeezing the fingers Nicky had poked him with.

 

“I’m okay,” he assured all three people at his bedside.

 

“You looked like you were about to drop off,” Nicky said in accusing tones. Jamie pulled a face.

 

“Yes, but not _die_.”

 

“We only worry when he stops breathing,” Liz said drily. “Thanks, Nicks.”

 

Lyle made to stand up. “Should I go and get James?”

 

Jamie shook his head. “No. It’s okay.”

 

Liz and Nicky let out identical snorts, and Jamie grinned. Not antagonistic all the time, obviously; maybe it was only him Nicky was quite so moody towards, Lyle reflected. “Minion!” Jamie said imperiously, with a snap of his fingers, and Liz stuck out her tongue at him.

 

“‘ _“My Lord!” Snape protested, raising his wand..._ ’”

 

 

***

 

James Lester was not, by any means, having such a peaceful time. He had suffered through the doctor’s awkward, jargon-laden explanation of Jamie’s current dire condition, and the tentative suggestion that Jamie should be allowed to consider his choices, along with the regretful comment that medicine could not prolong Jamie’s life much longer; that wasn’t so bad, not when he knew that Jon was just down the corridor and waiting for him, even though he also knew that Kathy was going to haul him over the coals about Jon as soon as this was over.

 

He coughed and leaned forward, resting his folded hands on his knees- a position which nicely disguised the fact that he had one hand clenched into a fist, sharp nails biting into the palm. This wasn’t easy on either him or his ex-wife; he could practically feel her radiating a tense fury beside him, and he knew she would lash out at something soon unless she managed to keep herself under control- when they were married, he’d been quite good at distracting her before she castrated the offensive, the patronising and the cutesy. “Doctor, are you trying to tell us that Jamie is dying?”

 

Dr. Flaxman caught his breath, and wondered if being unnerving ran in the family; he hesitated, and then nodded. Kathy clenched her fists, well-kept nails leaving half-circles in her palm and skin stretching white and pink over her knuckles, and Lester set his teeth, trying to exert some control over himself. He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again, but Kathy spoke before he did.

 

“And we should- we and Jamie –consider the options.” Her voice hadn’t changed; it still had the same power and clarity that had captivated him when she was in the middle of giving the proposition’s opening speech at a university debate and he was trying to note down rebuttals and watch her at the same time.

 

Dr. Flaxman nodded again. Lester felt a little sorry for the man, really. They couldn’t be a comfortable family to deal with. “Further medical treatment cannot last long, Ms. Burke- and- er- there is quality of life to be considered.”

 

Lester nodded understandingly. Kathy was surprisingly squeamish, sometimes, and mostly it had been him and later Liz who had held Jamie’s head while he threw up, chemotherapy making him horribly nauseous. He was well-acquainted with the vicissitudes of toxic medicine. “Thank you, Doctor. We should... speak to Jamie.”

 

“Does he know?” Kathy asked.

 

The doctor nodded once more. It was turning out to be a very useful gesture, faced with this lot.

 

Kathy paused, and then said carefully: “Liz? Nicky? Do you know if they know?”

 

“Liz knows,” Lester said quietly. “You know what she’s like around Jamie, Kathy. She came crashing into my workplace a couple of hours ago to tell me she knew, and that Jamie knew too. I couldn’t speak for Nicky, but I doubt he’s aware of... the situation.” Bureaucratic jargon was a lifesaver, he swore it.

 

That earned him a very sharp glance, though; one of the reasons they had divorced was Lester’s refusal to speak to Kathy about his job, which had led to her assumption and later belief that he was having an affair. “We should speak to them,” she noted. Another woman’s voice might have been soft; Kathy’s just shook slightly. _Pretend you’re strong for as long as you can_ \- he knew the mindset fairly well.

 

The doctor nodded, and Kathy reflected viciously that he was beginning to resemble a bobbing dog toy in the back of someone’s car. “Yes.” He cleared his throat and stood. “Let me know what decision you come to.”

 

“We will,” Kathy said.

 

“Thank you, doctor,” Lester added. Out of habit, he held the door open for Kathy, and she breezed past him without a look or a word, but when he went out into the corridor too she was waiting for him, her eyes sharp. She looked embattled, and he felt a burst of sympathy for her- from what he’d heard, her last relationship after the divorce had fizzled out, and she had no-one like Jon to comfort her. That wasn’t to say that any serious expression of sympathy wouldn’t earn him a snappish rebuke.

 

Kathy looked him up and down. “You look in need of a drink before we join the others, James, and I imagine I do too,” she commented. “Since this is a hospital, coffee will have to do. The café is two floors down.”

 

She made a sharp about-face and headed purposefully for the hospital café, and, with a sinking heart, Lester followed her. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, according to Monty Python; on balance, Lester rather thought that Monty Python was wrong.


	7. Chapter 7

The café was slightly depressing. Decorated in shades of green and yellow, with a roped-off area of tables, its only customers were a dull-eyed young woman in a pink t-shirt and someone peroxide blonde who was presumably her mother.

 

Ignoring the dispiriting décor, Kathy marched up to the counter and ordered two coffees, one black, no sugar, one white. She turned to Lester. “You still take your coffee black, don’t you, James?”

 

He nodded.

 

“I thought so. You can be very predictable.”

 

“Thank you,” Lester said dryly.

 

Kathy almost smiled.

 

After a moment, the waitress tentatively handed over the two coffees, apparently petrified just by Kathy’s appearance- Lester couldn’t blame her –and Lester was forced to sweep his up quickly, the hot polystyrene cup burning his hand, before Kathy could take charge of it. Kathy ignored this, and chose a table some way away from both the counter and the other customers.

 

Lester sat down opposite her, trying to control his anxiety. What was she going to say now?

 

“I have some questions, James,” she said, the business-like sound of her voice faintly ominous.

 

“Fire away,” he said, and then regretted it. Too flippant- gallows humour. Tasteless of him.

 

His tone earned him a censorious flicker of one of Kathy’s eyebrows, but she collected herself and looked him straight in the eyes, cool and disassociated. “Firstly: Lyle, Lieutenant Lyle.”

 

Lester took a sip of his coffee, and tried to look bored and pretend he hadn’t noticed the faint snide tone to that phrase at the same time. “Yes?”

 

“Did you leave me for him?”

 

“No,” he said, and was glad to be able to say so truthfully.

 

She held his eyes for a moment, and then sipped at her own drink. “You’d better not have done. How long?”

 

“Have we been... together, you mean? Some months.”

 

“Liz knows, I hope?”

 

“And thoroughly approves. They make a lethal team.”

 

“Oh _dear_ , James.” Her eyes gleamed, whether with malice or mischief he wasn’t sure. “Whatever have you let yourself in for?”

 

“I ask myself that, sometimes.”

 

“I’m sure I don’t blame you,” Kathy commented. “How did you meet him?”

 

“Through work,” Lester said blandly.

 

Kathy’s eyes sharpened. “Wonderful how you lead me on to my next point. What are you doing at work, James?”

 

“I can’t tell you that, Kathy, and you know it,” he said firmly.

 

“Then why can you tell Liz?” Kathy said sharply.

 

“I wouldn’t have done so, but Liz had an accident which made it imperative for me to tell her- sheer chance. She was fine,” he added, answering Kathy’s unasked question, “a little shaken, but fine.”

 

“When was this?” Kathy demanded, frowning and tapping her nails on the plastic table-top.

 

“Last year. Don’t ask her about it. She won’t tell you.”

 

“Still loyal to you, is she?” There was a kind of bitterness in Kathy’s voice. Mother and daughter weren’t very close, although Kathy wished they were; they were an explosive combination which led to frequent arguments.

 

“I would be flattered if that was as true as you seem to think it is, but it’s not personal, it’s a matter of national security,” Lester drawled.

 

“Hence the fact that you met your boyfriend, who is a soldier, through work,” Kathy nodded. “It must be _very_ high-security, James.”

 

Lester mentally cursed Kathy’s ability to string together little bits of information. He had confidence in his ability to keep the details of the anomaly project quiet, but it wouldn’t be unlike Kathy to become interested and start digging. The thought crossed his mind that if Kathy did that, she might come into contact with Helen, and for a moment he amused himself with wondering what the outcome of _that_ meeting would be. Explosive, no doubt.

 

“James. James!”

 

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Yes? Sorry, I was a little preoccupied.”

 

“I _will_ find out about this job of yours.”

 

“You’ll certainly try, Kathy,” Lester sighed, misliking the determined look in his ex-wife’s eyes; Kathy was razor-sharp and pig-headedly stubborn, and if she really got the bit between her teeth might make a few uncomfortable discoveries. He was too tired and drained to fend off her questions.

 

Kathy sniffed, and took an ill-advisedly large gulp of the coffee, which made her grimace.

 

“Hot?” he enquired.

 

“No. Just _awful_ coffee.”

 

That made him smile; for a moment, she’d looked very like Liz in the same situation, although Liz would probably have commented on the lousiness of the coffee in more stringent terms.

 

“What are you smiling at?” she demanded, half-smiling for a moment herself, and he just shook his head.

 

“Nothing in particular.”

 

“Hmm.” Her eyes narrowed as if she didn’t believe him, and her voice turned serious. “I will find out what your secret project is, James.”

 

“It’s not my project,” he pointed out smoothly. “It’s a job, like any other.”

 

“If it were _like any other_ you would have told me about it, and we wouldn’t be here.”

 

Lester bit the inside of his cheek. She was probably right; if he’d been able to tell her the full truth about the ARC, they could probably have patched their marriage back together again, but how long would it have lasted? “It’s possible,” he admitted.

 

She was silent for a while. “Don’t ask me to make Nicky meet your boyfriend. I don’t care if Jamie didn’t mind, I will not let you two play happy families at the expense of my son’s happiness.”

 

“I wouldn’t. Nicky’s choice entirely- as we agreed it would be for our children if either of us ever met someone new.” He sighed. “I suspect Nicky and Jon have already met, if he went into the ward to sit with Liz and Jamie.”

 

Silence again, and again, Kathy broke it. “Jamie.”

 

“Yes.”

 

Kathy took another gulp of coffee, barely noticing the nasty taste this time, and put it down hard, her movements growing jerky and restless. Lester recognised the signs of Kathy thinking about something she hated, and knew that if acute lymphoblastic leukaemia had been a person, Kathy and Liz would have torn it to pieces between them a long time ago- and he wouldn’t have been far behind. Finally, Kathy looked at him, something that wasn’t quite open appeal in her eyes. “James, what do we _do_? We _can’t_ \- what the doctor said. We _can’t_ give up!”

 

Lester sipped his coffee. Kathy was right; it was terrible, but still more or less coffee. “I don’t think it’s our choice any more,” he said quietly.

 

Kathy’s head shot up and she glowered at him. “What in hell do you mean by _that_?”

 

“It’s Jamie’s life, and Jamie’s choice to make. No, Kathy, wait!” he said sharply as the woman began to splutter furiously, brown eyes blazing. “Think about it! Calm down and think.”

 

“What is there to think about?” Kathy exploded, attracting attention from the other customers. “We’re his parents, for fuck’s sake!”

 

“Kathy, keep your voice down!” Lester hissed. “Yes, I know we’re his parents, I will thank you to remember that I was present at both conception _and_ birth, but has it ever occurred to you that it’s his life? It’s no longer a question of putting him into remission forever, Kathy, he’s-“ his voice hitched involuntarily- “he’s dying and... and if he wants to do it without a last gasp of medicine that makes him so sick he can only cry, I will let him do it! I- will- let- him- do- it! I will let him go. If that’s what he wants- if- _Damn_!” he choked, feeling the tears well up in his eyes and fished a couple of tissues out of his jacket pocket, stuffing one into Kathy’s hands.  He wiped the wetness around his eyes away roughly and continued as steadily as he could: “His choice, Kathy, he has to choose. He knows what he wants.”

 

Kathy was crying freely now, silent and helpless with her head buried in her hands and only the convulsive shaking of her shoulders to tell that she was crying, but she still shook her head stubbornly. _We have to try. We can’t let him throw his life away!_ She didn’t say it, but Lester could almost hear it ring in his ears.

 

He sighed again and lobbed the balled-up tissue at a bin, with a certain amount of satisfaction as it fell neatly into the bin. He couldn’t convince her. “We’ll talk to Jamie.”

 

***

 

Liz took a breath, ready to begin the next paragraph, and then looked up sharply as she heard the ward doors swing open; Jon was already twisting round to see who it was. Kathy and Lester entered, Lester looking rather subdued, Kathy a little red around the eyes.

 

 _Shit_ , Liz thought, and was startled to realise she’d said it aloud. Jamie tutted mildly, but his hands were clenched in the sheets and his eyes fixed on his mother: there was a curious expression on his face- determined, but just a bit frightened, not looking forward to the inevitable conflict when he told his mother that he wanted to stop the medication. Automatically, Liz turned to him. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

 

He shook his head, with the ghost of a smile. “No. This is _my_ fight to win, Liz.”

 

Liz leant over and hugged him, the book precariously balanced on her lap. “Sure?”

 

Jamie swatted lightly at her. “Yeah.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Nicky demanded peevishly, twisting uncomfortably back and forth in his seat, trying to work out why everything was suddenly so tense.

 

Liz swore quietly at Nicky’s ignorance. He had no idea what was going on, and she was probably going to have to tell him now or he’d never stop pestering. “Clueless,” she muttered, and then added more loudly, “Up, squirt. We’re off. Mum and Dad and Jamie need to talk.”


	8. Chapter 8

“I am not going,” Nicky protested, scowling.

 

“Nicholas!” his mother warned, and Nicky turned the scowl on her in vain- she simply returned it with interest. He wavered for a moment, then settled again in his seat.

 

“I’m not going anywhere. You’ll just talk about important things and I’ll be left out.”

 

Liz stuffed the book into her bag, got up and walked around the bed, seized her younger brother’s arm and lifted him forcibly out of his seat- or tried to. She was strong, but Nicky was eleven and solidly built, and not easy to shift. “Nicks, move,” she ordered.

 

“No,” Nicky said through gritted teeth.

 

Lester gave a long-suffering sigh, and then fixed his son with a gimlet eye. “Nicholas Theodore, you have a choice. You will either be out of that chair and out of this ward in the next thirty seconds on your own two feet, or Liz and I will carry you out. There was a nice little fountain on the first floor. I’m sure we can arrange to drop you in it.”

 

“Don’t,” Kathy said. “He’s technically ill.”

 

“ _What_?” Lester said dangerously. “He’s ill and you brought him into a _leukaemia ward_?”

 

“ _Technically_ , I said,” Kathy hissed. “He threw up yesterday, after going to Sam Marillier’s birthday party, and the school’s rules are if they throw up in the evening don’t send them to school the next day. I suspect he just had too much cake. He certainly isn’t running a temperature today, and he ate breakfast and kept it down. There’s no-one I can leave him with, and I rang Noor –the GP, James- and she said he was fine!”

 

Nicky’s scowl deepened, and he wrenched his arm out of Liz’s grip so as to fold his arms and slouch dangerously.

 

“This is beside the point,” Lester said. “Nicky, go.”

 

“Please,” Jamie said softly, and Nicky’s eyes shifted from side to side, as if caught in a trap, then he huffed.

 

“All _right_.” Nicky got up and stamped out of the ward.

 

Liz snorted, and followed him, her footsteps lighter and quicker; Lyle turned to go, catching Lester’s eye and holding it for a moment. _Yeah, I’m here. It’s okay_. Slowly, the older man relaxed a little.

 

“Excuse me, lovebirds,” Kathy said in a rather tight voice. “If you don’t mind.”

 

Lester smiled slightly, and sat down. Lyle suppressed a smirk (uncharitable of him, and Claire would wallop him if she knew) and went out of the ward to join Liz and Nicky.

 

He found Liz patiently leaning against a wall, hanging onto Nicky’s ear with finger and thumb- or rather, fingernail and thumbnail. Lyle winced. Liz’s nails were permanently kept short, too short for dirt to get under them, but even so, that had to be painful given the way she was digging them in, and Nicky’s muttered commentary of ‘ouch’ and ‘quit it, Liz!’, interspersed with a few swearwords no eleven-year-old should be using, made him think that it definitely was.

 

“There you are,” Liz said calmly, and released her brother’s ear. He glowered at her and made to punch her in the kidney, but she just stepped out of the way and murmured scornfully: “Subtle, Nicky.”

 

“He would have got you if you’d moved a fraction slower,” Lyle disagreed. He had seen the blow catch the edge of Liz’s t-shirt.

 

Liz stuck her tongue out at him. “Let’s not hang about, shall we? I swear I saw a café round here somewhere.”

 

She turned and walked away, round the corner. Nicky lingered for a moment, muttering “Sisters!” in dark tones and rubbing his ear where Liz had pinched it, and then slouched off.

 

Jon hung around, peering through the window in the heavy ward door. Heavy glass criss-crossed with wire, preserved like an insect in amber, it was small and only allowed a limited view; still, if he craned his neck he could just see Jamie, Kathy and Lester, Kathy and Lester with their backs to him and Jamie’s eyes on them, pale face earnest.

 

“Oi.”

 

The call came from the end of the corridor, and Jon turned quickly, to see Nicky standing there with his semi-permanent scowl still on his face and his hands jammed into his pockets. “You coming or what?” he said, tone surly, and then spun on his heel and walked back around the corner.

 

Lyle spared one more glance through the glass, and then walked quickly in the same direction Nicky had gone till he caught up with the siblings. Liz was perched casually on an arm of a wooden bench in one of the many corridors, outside an office, swinging one foot absently and staring at a framed newspaper cutting with her mind elsewhere; Jon’s footsteps  made her look round and get up.

 

“I think the café’s this way,” she said, and walked down the corridor.

 

Unfortunately, the hospital had very few distinguishing features in its labyrinthine corridors, as interior decorators are rarely hired to beautify the NHS; they were all painted white, with the same pebble grey and pea-green linoleum throughout, and an attempt to navigate by the signs led them in circles. Liz marched confidently down these, making unpredictable left turns, sudden and unexplained about-faces and never once giving up hope of finding either a floor-plan or a café around the next corner. After the first ten minutes, Jon began to wonder if Liz was doing it deliberately to enrage Nicky, as he knew Liz’s sense of direction was excellent –a number of car journeys had been enlivened by Liz snatching the map and brooding over it for a couple of minutes before finding a workable route- and could see that Nicky was becoming increasingly annoyed by the fact that they seemed to be going nowhere. It seemed as if his suspicions were confirmed when Liz made a decisive right turn into what should have been a corridor and turned out to be a broom-cupboard, prompting a noisy row between brother and sister and Nicky accosting a doctor to ask for directions which they successfully followed to reception, but when he asked she just shot him a poisonous look and he correctly assumed that she had been genuinely lost.

 

At the reception, Nicky further irritated his sister by charming the receptionist into giving them comprehensive directions to the several small cafés or cafeterias dotted about the hospital, not to mention the in-house branch of WHSmith’s, which got noted down on a scrap of paper and followed assiduously until they reached the melancholic green-and-yellow café, whereupon Nicky swanned off to buy the largest, sugariest chocolate bar WHSmith’s stocked before his mother caught him and confiscated it.

 

Jon breathed an unsubtle sigh of relief, and sat firmly down at the nearest table. Liz joined him.

 

“Nicky’s a jerk,” she grumbled, flopping half onto the table with her head lying on her arms. “I’d have been fine if he hadn’t been _moaning_ all the time. Honest to God, he’s such a wuss.”

 

Jon remembered his personal theory that Nicky held a grudge against Liz because he felt excluded from the close bond his two elder siblings had, and decided this was not the time to discuss it. He jerked his head at the café counter. “Do you want anything?”

 

“Uhh,” Liz said intelligently, and sat up straight. “Coke? Thanks.”

 

He got up and bought the fizzy drink and a very bad coffee, which he drank despite the taste. Nicky came back, and collapsed inelegantly into the furthest chair he could find from Lyle which was still at the same table, breaking bits off a large Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate bar and eating them. He had chocolate round his mouth, which made him look younger, and he’d fixed an unblinking and very disconcerting stare on Lyle; it didn’t help that he was the only one of Lester’s three children to have inherited both a number of Lester’s characteristic facial expressions, such as the Unpleasant Stare, and Lester’s blue eyes. This gave Jon the impression that a younger version of the caricature of Lester most of the ARC staff knew, cold, calculating and sarcastic, was staring at him over the table, which put him off his coffee.

 

After a while, Nicky withdrew his stare and kicked his sister again. Liz, who had been sitting slumped in her chair with her eyes fixed on the plastic tabletop, occasionally taking a gulp from the bottle of Coke, jumped, startled, and immediately retaliated. Nicky squeaked in pain and rubbed his shin, glowering at Liz as she snorted with laughter. Jon wondered if he was supposed to tell them off.

 

“When you’ve finished cackling, _Elizabeth_ ,” Nicky said indignantly, and the smirk vanished from Liz’s face.

 

“Don’t you call me Elizabeth, _Nicholas_.”

 

“Grandma Joan calls you Elizabeth,” Nicky pointed out. “So does Uncle Charlie.”

 

“Uncle Charlie is a tool and Grandma Joan is senile,” Liz said crisply. “She only called me Elizabeth when I was six. Now she thinks I’m her older sister Isobel and keeps asking me questions about the Wrens. I think I can discount her naming conventions.”

 

“Wrens?” Jon asked, wondering what the Women’s Royal Naval Service had to do with Liz’s great-aunt.

 

“Great-Auntie Isobel? She was Mum’s aunt, except Mum never met her. She was a mechanic in the Wrens in the Second World War,” Liz said briefly. “She nearly drowned three times, had her fiancé’s baby after he died (so did it, actually, when it was a couple of months old) and then either got lost or lost herself on a moor in the fog in the middle of winter and died too. Grandma Joan thinks I’m her and lectures me about proper conduct at top volume when she’s not discussing life on the high seas.”

 

“Interesting story,” Jon commented, intrigued.

 

Liz shrugged. “Kind of. I don’t like my Burke relatives much. They’re all very respectable.”

 

“ _Afternoon tea_ ,” Nicky said with disgust. “The cakes were nice, but I _hate_ cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey tastes like dust and I had to sit there for _ages_. And you should have seen what they made me wear to Cousin Harriet’s wedding. You’re so lucky you were sick!”

 

Liz grinned, but didn’t pass comment. There was a few moments’ blessed silence, then Nicky kicked Liz’s ankle again, but more gently this time. Liz moved her foot out of the way. “What now?”

 

“Why are we down here? What are they talking about?” Nicky demanded.

 

His older sister looked at him for a long moment. He met her eyes, not understanding why she was so solemn, and then almost snapped: “What?”

 

“Jamie’s dying,” Liz said quietly, and there was a little involuntary hitch in her voice. She turned away, jaw set, eyes fixed on the pea-green floor.

 

“What?” Nicky said again, scornfully. “You believe that? He’s not. Of course he’s not.”

 

“He is,” Liz whispered.

 

“He’ll be fine,” Nicky scoffed, “he’ll get better, he always does.”

 

“He won’t,” Liz disagreed, voice squeaking towards the end as she forced herself to speak.

 

Nicky reached out and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Look, Jamie always looks really ill, but he gets better. Come on, you’ve seen it be-“

 

“ _Shut up_ ,” Jon ordered; Liz was still turned away from Nicky, but he could see her face slowly crumpling; and then Liz had to admit that she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself crying, and covered her face with her hands.

 

Nicky watched his sister sob silently, shoulders shaking, face pressed into her hands like they were some kind of sanctuary; wordlessly he looked at Lyle, horrorstruck, and Lyle looked back at him, expressionless. He saw the boy’s eyes fill with confusion and hurt, and Nicky broke eye contact with him.

 

Lyle glanced at Liz. He didn’t know if he’d be able to give her any comfort; he knew who she needed right now, since Lester was probably in too much of a state himself to be of any help, but her girlfriend, Juliet, wasn’t here. He checked his watch; ten to five- Juliet would be out of school now –and wondered if he’d get away with snaffling Liz’s phone out of her bag to call her girlfriend and get her to come to the hospital.

 

The silence was getting embarrassing, awkwardly stretched thin as Nicky tried to understand what he’d just been told and Liz cried- and then the strains of a sickly-sweet Taylor Swift song (Juliet had evidently changed Liz’s ringtone again) clanged mercilessly into it.

 

_You be the prince and I’ll be the princess, it’s a love story, baby just say yes..._

 

Liz swore and reached for the phone, her eyes swollen and reddened with tears. “Hi,” she said, voice thickened and choked, and then her eyes flew wide with surprise. “Juliet!”

 

Jon breathed a silent sigh of relief, and thanked any stray deities that might have been listening and feeling helpful.

 

“I got your text,” the familiar voice of her girlfriend said from the other end of the phone-line. “You’re at the hospital, yes? I’m on the bus there, I’ll be with you in five minutes. Go down to reception, and I’ll meet you there.”

 

“Jules,” Liz sobbed helplessly, more tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, “I-“

 

“I know,” Juliet interrupted, her voice softer. She paused. “I’ll be with you in five minutes, I swear. Wait for me, okay?”

 

Liz nodded, remembered Juliet couldn’t see her over the phone, and said unsteadily: “Yes.”

 

“Good. I’ll be there soon, sweetheart. All right?”

 

“Okay.” Liz ended the call, and put her mobile away, then sat back in her seat, looking up at the ceiling and trying to steady herself. Then she stood, and grabbed her bag, leaving the half-finished bottle of Coke on the table. “I’m going down to reception,” she said, mostly to Lyle, and shook her head, as if to clear it of tears, one fist clenching and relaxing, the other wound tightly around one strap of her rucksack, staring away from the others, down a wide corridor to where some grateful patient had paid for an inexplicable stained-glass window; intermittent sunshine stained the linoleum with patches of vibrant colour.

 

The teenager drew a deep breath and walked away.

 

***

 

Two minutes later, Lester came down. “Jamie would like to say something to all of us,” he informed Nicky and Jon, with a fair assumption of calm. Then he frowned. “Where’s Liz?”

 

“Gone down to reception,” Jon explained. “Juliet’s coming.”

 

Lester closed his eyes, relieved. “Thank God. The cavalry has arrived.”

 

Jon nodded. “Now both of you have someone to look after you,” he said, and got up. “God knows you need it,” he added, not quite joking.

 

Lester half-laughed. “I know. I’m a wreck. If they could see me now at the office...”

 

“They can’t,” Jon said, sliding an arm around his shoulders and squeezing briefly. He couldn’t see Nicky’s reaction, which was definitely a good thing in his book.

 

“And a very good thing too,” Lester sighed. “Let’s go.”

 

***

 

Juliet turned up exactly three minutes and twenty-two seconds afterwards, and went straight to Liz and wrapped her arms around the taller girl.

 

“Juliet!” Liz whispered, and burst into tears.


	9. Chapter 9

            The small group entered the ward. Kathy raked sharp brown eyes over them and demanded: “Where’s Liz?”  


            “Waiting for Juliet to get here,” Lester said shortly, and Kathy frowned. “-Oh God, Kathy, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten who Juliet _is_.”

 

            “No, I know- Liz’s girlfriend. _Why_ she’s coming is what I want to know.”

 

            “Because she knows Liz needs her,” Jamie leapt in before his father or Lyle could say a word, effectively silencing Kathy for a few moments.

 

            “But...”

 

            “If Liz and Juliet had just started dating, I would understand, Kathy,” Lester said dryly. “As matters stand, I suspect Juliet can give Liz as much comfort as any of us could.”

 

            Kathy’s mouth twisted uncomfortably, as if she’d just bitten into an under-ripe apple and found it sour, and she got a sharp look from her ex-husband which said _now is not the time to discuss the fact that you are not comfortable with our daughter having a girlfriend_. It was a lot for just one look to hold, but he managed it.

 

Lyle’s eyes darted to Jamie, who shrugged slightly, resignedly, casting his eyes to heaven, but Lyle could see the stifled traces of a very cross expression on his face- and then it was gone.

 

There was an extremely uncomfortable silence, which Nicky, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, broke. “So what happens now?”

 

Kathy swallowed, evidently deciding how best to break the news gently to her son that his brother was dying, and Nicky looked alarmed and said, too hastily: “I already know. Liz told me. I asked her.”

 

Lester nodded. “Well, there are- details which need to be sorted out, but-“

 

“For pity’s sake,” Jamie said mildly, and looked straight at Nicky. “I’ve had enough, Nicks. I’m dying slowly and I hate it. The medicine makes me feel worse than the leukaemia does and I’m never going back into remission again, so I’m going to give up and die somewhere that isn’t a goddamned hospital, because I think I’ve earned it.”

 

All three adults turned quickly to Nicky, wondering how he was going to cope with this blunt statement, and reeling inside a little at the unexpected force in Jamie’s words. The younger boy was white-faced, his eyes very wide, and he was chewing hard on his lower lip, but he didn’t cry and he nodded jerkily, then stepped past his mother and father, kicked his trainers off and climbed up onto the bed with Jamie, carefully avoiding his brother’s IV, where he wrapped a cautious arm around Jamie and muttered something that might –if your ears were sharp enough- have been ‘want a hug’. Jamie smiled, murmured something back that might have been a soothing ‘you can have one’ and put a thin arm around Nicky, leaning his head against the other boy’s, and Lester noticed the contrast between one, vivid and sturdy with colour in his skin, and the other, thin, pale, fragile; Nicky was holding onto his brother as gently he might have done spun glass, and he was right to. Nobody watching would be able to tell who was comforting who.

 

It was probably against every rule the hospital had. None of them cared.

 

“D’you get it now?” Jamie asked a while later, his voice gentle.

 

His little brother made a noise that might have been interpreted as unwilling assent.

 

“Good,” Jamie said, and ruffled the younger boy’s hair. Nicky sat up on the bed, sniffed, and glared at him, brown hair bearing a close resemblance to an unusually messy bird’s nest and blue eyes red-rimmed. He had a very large hole in his sock, Lester noted.

 

“This sucks,” he pronounced flatly, reminding everyone present forcibly of Liz, and Lyle added another smidgen of evidence to his theory that brother and sister were more alike than they cared to admit.

 

Jamie, however, just laughed and smiled warmly at his brother. “It kind of does.”

 

“No bloody _kind of_ about it,” Nicky muttered, picking at the frayed hem of his jeans as his parents automatically snapped ‘Language, Nicky!’ at the same time.

 

“Very true,” Jamie agreed, and nudged his brother with a foot. “Off you get, before one of the nurses drops round and kills us all for misbehaving.”

 

Nicky snorted, stuffed his feet back into his trainers, slipped off the bed and tried to pretend he wasn’t close to tears; Lyle saw the way he ducked his head, hiding his face, and hunched his shoulders defensively.

 

“It’s all right, Nicky,” Jamie said quietly, watching the boy scuff the toe of his right trainer on the ground in the uncomfortable silence, and Nicky made another indefinable noise in reply which Lester was pretty sure translated to ‘that’s not true’.

 

Kathy tried to get the conversation back on a track it hadn’t had in the first place. “We should discuss practicalities,” she said with a fair assumption of brisk professionalism. “If you two-“ she nodded at Nicky and Lyle- “could possibly go and find Liz and Juliet...”

 

Lyle considered several answers, decided none of them were fit to be spoken to Liz’s mother –at least, not by him- and stayed exactly where he was. Nicky was blunter.

 

“You’ve got to be kidding, Mum. Juliet’ll only just have got here, Liz’ll still be crying on her shoulder.”

 

Kathy could hardly object; she shifted slightly and then sat very straight in her chair, a mannerism Lester recognised as meaning that she was uncomfortable and trying not to show it, and he sighed. “Kathy, they’ll be here soon enough.”

 

“They’d better be,” Jamie said. “I want Liz to keep reading to me.”

 

That comment made his father shoot him a sharp glance. Jamie very rarely made demands of any kind of anyone, and if he was getting fractious it might be a symptom of fever, but Jamie’s tone had been light and cheerful and his eyes were clear and lucid without a hint of feverishness. Just to check, Lester leaned over and laid the back of his hand against the boy’s forehead; Jamie put up with it, rolling his eyes affectionately. Normal. Not even a hint of a temperature, so far as Lester could tell.

 

“I’m fine, Dad,” Jamie said, apparently mind-reading Lester’s concerns, and Lester raised an eyebrow. “Well, okay, so I’m not. You knew what I meant.”

 

***

 

Downstairs Juliet had led Liz over to a row of inadequately-padded chairs near the reception- they must have been for patients’ families, or waiting patients, or... Juliet had no idea –removed Liz’s bag, put it on the floor and sat down with Liz, holding as much of her as possible and stroking her hair, whispering meaningless platitudes. Liz was crying hard, like she was angry as well as desperately sad, heavy chest-wracking sobs, soaking Juliet’s jumper. Juliet just waited, still murmuring to her softly, until the sobbing subsided and stopped and Liz disentangled herself slowly from Juliet’s arms and sat up, looking into the other girl’s face. Her eyes were bleak, reddened with tears, salt tracks meandering down her cheeks; she blinked, eyelashes glued together in dark spikes, and the last few tears slid out of her eyes. Juliet slipped an arm around her shoulders to hold her up, and leaned forward to kiss her softly; she felt Liz melt into the contact, and hold onto her to keep her balance.

 

“I’m here,” she murmured, when she broke the kiss and Liz buried her head in her girlfriend’s shoulder.

 

“I know,” she said, sounding rather muffled. “I know. Thank you. Oh, God. Look at me- bloody wreck.”

 

“You’re always gorgeous,” Juliet claimed untruthfully. “Covered in mud... soaking wet... pissed off... tearful... still stunning. Right now you’re pretty in a broken kind of way.”

 

“Charmed,” Liz said, with a certain amount of sarcasm, sniffled, and got up. “Where’s the loos?”

 

Juliet got up too and pointed her in the direction of the appropriate sign, and they set off together, pushing through the heavy swing door and stepping past a very bored cleaner; Liz made a beeline for the sinks, and splashed her face with cold water, turning the tap on full to run an irregular crescendo of water and washing away the dried tears and the redness with it, uncaring or maybe not even noticing that it ran down her neck, dampened her hair and left darker trails on her shirt. Juliet perched on the counter the basins of the sinks were sunk into, watching, and jumped down when she finished, only to be pulled into a very tight hug.

 

“I’m glad you came,” Liz said quietly into Juliet’s ear, and kissed her; the cleaner rolled his eyes, but neither of them saw, and when they left the washroom they were holding hands, fingers folded close around each other.

 

***

 

“There you are,” Kathy said with a faint edge of exasperation as the pair finally reached the ward.

 

“Here we are,” Liz agreed, hand tightening on Juliet’s for a moment, and Juliet carefully ignored the tenseness between mother and daughter and said hello to various people instead, never letting go of Liz’s hand.

 

“So,” Liz said, and Juliet drifted closer almost as if she didn’t mean to until their shoulders touched, “what happens now?”

 

Everyone looked at Jamie. “Well, Dad’s going to talk to Uncle Theo and Auntie Alison,” he told his sister confidently; he sounded in control and comfortable, but Juliet noted the pallor of his skin, his evident, almost painful delicacy. “It makes sense- you know, he’s a doctor and everything-“

 

“He works with allergies.”

 

“-Whatever. And I’d like to die where I can actually see the stars; you can’t, in the city. Not properly,” Jamie continued, and his sharp eyes caught the tightness of Lester’s jaw, the compression of Kathy’s lips, the way Liz’s grip suddenly became crushing enough to make Juliet wince and nudge her gently till she forced herself to loosen the hold, the way Nicky outright flinched and put his hands over his ears. Lyle just met his eyes steadily, face set, and Jamie’s lips twitched. He was sort of impressed that Lyle had realised he was watching the reactions to his words.

 

“Also,” he persisted, “Dad has to tell Uncle Ralph.”

 

Lester winced. “Thank you for the reminder,” he said dryly. “If the man perforates my eardrums and breaks the phone with his swearing, I shall blame you.”

 

Jamie grinned. “And Mum’s going to tell everyone on her side of the family who she... I don’t know. Who she thinks she ought to tell? But first,” he added, pointing at Liz, “You’re going to read to me. And the grown-ups can go away. It’s getting far too crowded in here.”

 

“Bossy!” Liz reproved, requisitioned a chair and sat down, fishing through her bag until she found _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_. Juliet dragged a chair across to sit next to her, curling improbably up on it and resting her chin on Liz’s shoulder.

 

“I think we’ve been dismissed,” Lester said, almost laughing, and Lyle grinned.

 

“I’ll come back and fetch you in an hour,” Kathy told Nicky. “All right?”

 

Nicky shrugged, eyes already riveted on Liz, who was riffling back and forth through the pages, trying to find her place. “Okay.”

 

“Look at them,” Lyle muttered to Lester, “spellbound.”

 

“Yes,” Lester replied quietly. “One of Kathy’s better ideas, getting Liz to read by making her read to Jamie.”

 

He leant slightly against Lyle, asking for comfort as much as Liz was of Juliet, but more subtly. Lyle took his hand briefly, squeezing and stroking a thumb across Lester’s knuckles briefly; he knew Lester wasn’t half the exhibitionist he was, and now was such a bad time to embarrass him Lyle wasn’t even going to consider it. “Let’s go,” Lyle suggested, and tugged him away from the hospital bed, raising a hand to Jamie, who nodded and smiled at them.

 

Kathy remained, just outside the little bubble Liz’s voice wove, rising and falling, slowing and quickening with the pace of the words, pulling the others into the story. Gently, she reached out and touched the curve of Jamie’s ear, just below the beanie hat he was wearing, catching his little smile before he turned back to Liz, moved around the bed on quiet feet to run a hand through Nicky’s hair, bringing it into some semblance of order –he wriggled, but didn’t protest- and finally, hesitantly, touching Liz’s shoulder, waiting for her to shift or complain or scowl, but she didn’t. After a moment, she realised that Juliet was watching her, blue eyes steady and unflinching, but then the girl blinked and turned away, resting her head comfortably on Liz’s other shoulder. Liz put an arm around her shoulders, one hand keeping the book steady, and read on.

 

***

 

Liz read for hours, till her voice cracked harshly and Jamie passed Juliet his glass of water for her, till Kathy came and took Nicky away, turning a deaf ear to his hushed complaints, till darkness began to fall, till Lester and Lyle came to fetch them and say goodbye to Jamie and the nurses came and pointed out quite kindly that they ought to go now because Jamie needed his rest, and Liz opened her mouth to insist on remaining, but Jamie looked at her and smiled and told her to get some sleep because she needed her rest too. His eyes were elsewhere: perhaps in his mind his feet were passing over the stone floors of Hogwarts, or perhaps a place more distant and less fathomable; whatever it was, the look on his face made Liz lean over and kiss his forehead, saying roughly “Don’t you dare die in the night, you hear me?”

 

Jamie shook his head and smiled again. He smiled a lot, Liz thought to herself, heart twisting; he always had, even when he was sick and frightened he’d summoned up the strength to smile at her, to offer her hope.

 

She didn’t have any hope any more, and that was a knife in her heart, cold and unyielding ( _left atrium, left ventricle, right atrium, right ventricle; aorta, pulmonary artery, pulmonary vein, vena cava_ , she thought, hearing her own heartbeat loud in her ears for a moment, picturing a heart) and she knew it would only take one more sharp twist, and she would come apart. She blinked, and felt herself sway: her sight had gone woolly, her eyelids heavy. She felt Juliet reach for and take her hand, a solid point of warmth, and followed her, exhausted. 

 

Liz never remembered falling asleep in the car, Lyle shaking her awake and helping Juliet manhandle her out of the car (“She’s just tired,” she heard him assure Juliet, “She’ll be okay,”) or the journey upstairs to the flat in the lift, blinking sleepily at her father, leaning heavily against Juliet. A little more alertness returned to her slowly as the lift travelled  upwards and the doors slid open with a melodious pinging noise, and by the time they reached the door and grouped around it while Lester unlocked it she was nearly awake.

 

They stepped inside, and Liz moved towards her bedroom, Juliet shadowing her closely. Liz pushed the familiar door open, with her name written on it in blue letters, and they were in her bedroom. Juliet heard soft voices behind her as Lester and Lyle re-locked the flat’s front door and passed by, presumably headed for their room at the end of the corridor, and then closed the bedroom door. Liz had flopped onto her bed with a ragged sigh and closed her eyes; Juliet watched as the other teenager kicked off her trainers, apparently not caring where they landed. Juliet went over and sat down beside Liz, putting a hand out to stroke her cheek, and Liz’s eyes opened and focussed on her.

 

            “You don’t have to stay,” she murmured.

 

            “I’m not leaving you.”

 

            Her girlfriend sat up, one arm slipping round Juliet’s waist, and kissed her; then buried her face in the other girl’s shoulder, her other arm wrapping around Juliet’s waist as well. Juliet shifted on the bed to keep her balance, and then slid her arms around Liz, holding tight; the younger teenager was utterly wrecked, she could feel it in the heaviness of Liz’s limbs and the way the girl was so still in her arms. Gently, she disengaged. “You need to eat.”

 

            “Tired,” Liz mumbled.

 

            “I know.” Juliet kissed Liz’s cheek, and felt Liz curl her hands into her t-shirt, turning her head to catch Juliet’s lips and kiss properly. “Up,” Juliet said when she had a spare breath, pulling Liz off the bed. “Toast and scrambled eggs.”

 

            Liz stumbled obediently after her into the corridor, and dutifully ate the scrambled eggs and toast Juliet made slightly inexpertly for both of them; Juliet went to put the saucepan to soak and the plates in the dishwasher, turned round, and found that Liz had gone to sleep with her head resting on the table. Juliet eyed her, and began to calculate methods of moving her.

 

Liz was considerably taller than Juliet, and too heavy for Juliet to contemplate carrying, so Juliet shook her until she stirred, hauled her out of the chair and led her back to her room, where she found Liz’s pyjamas under the girl’s pillow. She started to undress Liz, who was constantly threatening to fall asleep again, but Liz took over after a moment and Juliet got up to look for a pair of pyjamas to borrow in Liz’s wardrobe. She found a loose green pyjama shirt and trousers; she stripped, changed into these and went back to Liz, who had climbed under the duvet and was already more than half asleep. Juliet slid in beside her, a hand sliding through the other teenager’s dark hair and thumb stroking the side of her face. Liz hummed in her sleep, and some of the worry and sadness on her face slipped away; Juliet lay down, shifting till she got comfortable, and put an arm around her. She was just drifting off herself when Liz pulled her closer, resting her head on Juliet’s shoulder and tangling their legs together, clinging to the older teenager.

 

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, voice rough with sleep and thin with exhaustion.

 

“No,” Juliet whispered back. “I won’t. Promise.”


	10. Chapter 10

“It’s hit Liz hard,” Lyle commented, lounging on the bed and watching Lester undress. “All this.”

 

Lester nodded, lips thin. “She’s... closest... to Jamie.” He sat down on the bed beside his boyfriend and leaned against him, closing his eyes. “Like twins born two years apart, Kathy used to say. They’ve spent a lifetime tuning into each other’s moods, likes and dislikes. Liz used to beat up people who bullied Jamie on a depressingly regular basis.”

 

“I always thought she was quite a handy fighter.”

 

“That would be the playground brawls and the judo and karate- well, karate, then judo –classes I sent her to in order to get the aggression out of her system,” Lester said dryly, and climbed under the duvet. Lyle joined him, and switched off the bedside light casting a dim glow around the bedroom. It was early for either of them to go to bed, but Lester was almost as wrecked as Liz, and Lyle was feeling a bit battered himself. Sex was definitely out of the question. Neither of them was in the mood.

 

“I was thinking,” he said, tone careful. He wasn’t sure how Lester was going to take this.

 

Lester snorted. “Thinking?” But it was more half-hearted than usual, and there was less of the usual spirit in the sarcasm. Lyle moved closer to Lester, and refused to think of it as ‘snuggling’.

 

“Yes. Why is Kathy not happy with-“

 

“Liz and Juliet?” Lester filled in, and shrugged, sending a bony shoulder right into Lyle’s armpit, entailing a certain amount of ‘ouch!’, ‘stop being such a wuss!’ and reshuffling. “I’m not entirely sure. It may have something to do with the fact that Kathy wanted Liz to fit a mould... Normality, but not quite, if you see what I mean? Interesting normality, above-average normality, something she could understand and cope with. She wanted her daughter to be like her, and Liz-“

 

“Turned out very like you.”  


“-exactly. Although Liz is a lot like her mother, sometimes, she favours my side of the family much more. Anyway, Kathy is not so happy with Liz having a girlfriend for two reasons: one, because it’s another way in which Liz isn’t like her, and two because- well, she just isn’t. She’d be fine about a friend or a colleague of hers being homosexual, but her own daughter...” Lester fell silent. Lyle guessed that his eyes were open, steady and unblinking, as he thought over the question, but in the darkness it was hard to tell for sure. “Kathy has many admirable qualities,” he said eventually. “Her attitude to Liz’s girlfriend is not one of them. It really is not.”

 

“Jamie can’t stand it either,” Lyle noted. He had seen the look on Jamie’s face earlier when Kathy reacted to seeing Liz and Juliet, holding hands and all but joined at the hip.

 

“That’s Jamie for you.” Lester sounded proud, but sad. Lyle felt his heart freeze as he thought of the kind of pain Jamie’s inevitable death was going to put him and so many others through, and of the kind of pain Jamie was already in, and silently he pulled his boyfriend closer.

 

“What... You told me you’d made arrangements,” he said carefully, and felt Lester nod.

 

“I rang Theo,” he murmured. “He was shocked, but not- not as shocked as I was. I think he had a better idea of the odds- you know he’s a doctor?”

 

“Yes.”  


“Well, he said Jamie was perfectly within his rights to want a quiet- a quiet-“ Lester repeated himself, like a broken CD jarring and jolting, unable to get past one single ominous word.

 

“You don’t have to say it,” Lyle told him, and felt a kiss pressed against his collarbone in thanks.

 

“-and- well, it boils down to all of us going to Rose Cottage so- where- yes. He checked with Alison (I hope you remember Alison? His wife) and she’s upset, but vehement that Jamie is welcome.”  Lester paused. “It’s going to be a bit of a squash,” he admitted. “Rose Cottage is larger than it looks, but still... Ralph will certainly insist on being there, so you, me, Liz, Jamie, Nicky, Kathy, quite probably Juliet- squashed is not a strong enough word. People will probably end up sleeping on sofas.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Lyle said, and wrapped himself around as much of Lester as he could, trying to comfort him, and dismally aware that it probably wasn’t working.

 

***

 

A day and a night later, Lyle thought to himself that everything had moved very fast. With astonishing speed and all the zeal of people at the end of their tether, Kathy and Lester had sprung four days’ leave with a provision for compassionate leave when they needed it, as well as Lester having a brisk conversation with Lorraine Wickes and Jenny Lewis who had organised matters so that the ARC would run smoothly without his presence and Lyle would have the same amount of leave. Liz and Nicky’s schools had been informed, relatives had been rung round –Ralph’s ear-bursting yell of “What the _fuck_ , Jim?” being the most spectacular reaction so far- and permission extracted from Dr. Sayers for her daughter to join them.

 

There had been others to cope with- texts and phone calls from his team, some puzzled by his absence, most sympathetic, and Liz had got quite a few texts and Facebook messages too. Jamie had almost crashed his email inbox by posting a very succinct message on Facebook visible to all his friends that said, quite cheerfully, ‘Jamie Burke-Lester is dying’. Lyle was watching him as carefully as possible; he wasn’t sure how much of Jamie’s attitude was bravado, and how much genuine calm, and that flash of gallows humour concerned him just a little. He had not mentioned it to Lester, and nor had Liz or Juliet, who had discovered the message, and he wasn’t sure if Kathy or Nicky knew either. Liz had continued to read to Jamie in snatched moments or blocks of time, and all the adults had the uncomfortable feeling that she was racing to reach the end of the book before Jamie died, but when Lyle mentioned this hypothesis to Juliet she just looked blankly into his eyes, shrugged delicately and went to fetch Liz a glass of water so she could keep reading without losing her voice.

 

And now he was sitting in the passenger seat of Lester’s Mercedes, driving down to Rose Cottage, Wiltshire, at the crack of dawn. Kathy, Jamie and Nicky had gone there the previous night, and now Liz, Juliet, Lester and Lyle were going to join them. Kathy had gloomily predicted that it was going to be an absolute crush, which had earned a very prosaic “So some of us will end up sleeping on the floor, so what?” from Liz, which had made Kathy wince and Lester reassure her with little sympathy that Ralph and Nicky at least could sleep in a tent in the garden or on a sofa, and Theo and Alison were not short on spare rooms.

 

Lyle glanced into the back seat of the Mercedes. The two teenagers were sprawled across it, having somehow found enough leeway in their seatbelts for Liz to slouch against the door on her side, head pillowed on a jumper, with her legs stretching over to Juliet’s side, and for Juliet to lie on her side with her head resting on a bunched-up hoodie and Liz’s leg. They looked quite comfortable, really; Juliet had gone to sleep, curled peacefully up with her curtain of long blonde hair spilling artistically over her face, but Liz was wide awake with her iPod on, one hand resting lightly on Juliet’s head. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she stared straight back at Lyle, raising her eyebrows at him in enquiry. He shook his head, and turned back to looking out of the windscreen.

 

“So, I think I have this straight,” he commented after a while, looking at Lester. “You have two brothers, Ralph and Theo. Ralph isn’t married, Theo is, and his wife is Alison. We are staying with Theo and Alison.”

 

“Yes,” Lester said without taking his eyes off the road, smoothly accelerating past a chuntering Peugeot. “You’ve met them all. You do know who they are.”

 

“Your family is confusing,” Lyle defended himself without any regard for the truth.

 

“Don’t get me started on your stepfathers...”

 

In the back seat, Liz humphed and shifted slightly, seemingly irritated by the tone of the conversation in the front, and Juliet –perhaps not quite as asleep as everyone seemed to think- reached up and squeezed her hand, both comfort and warning. “Get some rest,” she whispered, aware, unlike Lester and Lyle, that Liz had slept deeply for a few hours and then drifted uneasily in and out of a kind of patchy sleep that was almost as tiring as not sleeping at all.

 

Liz said nothing, but when they reached Rose Cottage two hours and a brisk condemnation of the SatNav later, she was fast asleep.


	11. Chapter 11

 

The number of people who poured out onto the drive to welcome them was surprisingly large. The front door popped open and let out Theo, Alison and Ralph, all warned by the crackling of the gravel under the car’s tyres, while Nicky appeared from the garden with a long smudge of mud and grass stain on his jeans and a football in his hands. He nodded awkwardly at Lyle and said hello to his father and to Juliet, who peeled herself off the car seat and cheerfully warned him against waking Liz, then vanished back into the garden; the rhythmic thump of a football against a brick wall suggested he was practising taking penalties. Alison called after him, but Lester missed what she said; he was too busy being enfolded in an enormous, rib-crushing hug by both of his brothers in turn, which made Alison smile affectionately and go over to shake Lyle’s hand and kiss him on the cheek. She was a little shorter than Lester, her brother-in-law, with fair hair, strong bones and a gorgeous smile; she was also a demon cook, and if the chocolate smudge she’d just transferred to Lyle’s cheekbone was any indication, she’d been indulging in some serious baking.

 

“You all right?” she asked, raising her eyebrows at him.

 

Lyle shrugged. “Fine.”

 

“The day I believe that watching him go through hell isn’t taking everything out of you is the day pigs fly,” Alison said cheerfully, and moved on to greet Juliet, who was stretching thoroughly, before poking her head inside the car to say hello to Liz, who was stirring and blinking awake, looking like a displeased owl.

 

            Lyle stepped forward and accepted a crushing handshake from Ralph, and a slightly gentler one from Theo, then as they all moved to go inside –he could hear Theo coaxing Liz into wakefulness and out of the car with a sly mention of _Alison’s brownies_ \- reached out to brush Lester’s fingers with his own, just to let the other man know he was there; Lester glanced back at him and smiled fleetingly, a flash of peace in his eyes briefly drowning the hopelessness and pain.

 

            The three brothers were all very alike. They shared the same colour eyes and, to a great extent, the same build and bone structure, although both Ralph and Theo were taller than James and Ralph was heavier-set than either of his brothers. All three, Lyle knew, had caved at one point or another, although James and Ralph had banned Theo from joining them because he was so accident-prone, and all three were very clever; the only reason that the government only had one high-flying Lester hatchet-man was because neither Ralph nor Theo were remotely interested in the civil service as a career. Ralph had made caving his job, and Theo had, building on years of patching himself up after scrapes, bumps and unspeakable kitchen accidents, become a doctor- although studying allergies, which was inexplicable, as the only medical disaster he’d never had short of a shark bite was an allergic reaction.

 

Automatically, Lyle ducked his head to avoid the doorjamb as they entered the house and listened to Theo curse as he forgot to. Going on the delicious smell from the kitchen, Alison had indeed been indulging in brownies, and Lyle could almost hear both Liz and Juliet twitch into greater alertness as they registered the presence of chocolate.

 

“-so,” Alison was saying as he sidestepped a pair of wellington boots and watched Theo and Alison’s dog Spot bounce gleefully around the kitchen and jump up at Nicky, who had just entered by the back door, in order to lick behind his ears, “I put Jamie in the downstairs bedroom. Liz’ll want to stay with him, so I imagine kipping on the floor’s the order of the day there, and Juliet will join her if she wants to, of course. Ralph and Nicky have a tent on the lawn-“

 

“Still got to put that up,” Ralph observed, frowning up at the sky and wondering whether it was going to rain or not.

 

“-yes, well, feel free. Kathy’s in the guest bedroom at the top of the house and you and Jon- Earth to Jon, are you reading me?”

 

“Yes, Alison?” Lyle asked. He had been listening, but guessed that Alison had the teacher’s habit of picking on the child in the class who looked most like they were tuning the lesson out, and that in the current situation that translated to him.

 

“You and Jim are in the spare bedroom on the first floor, all right? The one with the green and white curtains.”

 

“Thanks,” he said. It was possible he was never going to get used to Lester being addressed as Jim, even Kathy called him James, but he’d noticed before that members of Lester’s family almost always called him Jim. (Ex-wives, he’d decided, didn’t count.) While Theo was occupied with the teapot and kettle, Alison was busy visiting destruction and washing-up liquid on a mixing bowl, and Ralph and Nicky were having a long and involved conversation that included, but was not limited to, the possibility of setting up a tent and methods of extracting stray footballs from next-door-neighbours’ gardens, he went and stood next to Lester and asked about this.

 

Lester seemed almost, but not quite, surprised to be asked. “Theo and Ralph always have, much the same way we’ve always called Theo Theo. And then Alison- I’ve known her for years, but she knew Ralph and Theo before she knew me so it never occurred to her to call me anything but Jim.”

 

“Auntie Alison,” Liz said, hauling the last of their combined baggage into the hall and hopping into the kitchen with an inexplicable plaster attached to her shoe, “can I have a brownie?”  


“Yes,” Alison said, passing Liz three on a plate and slapping her husband’s hand away at the same time, cheerfully ignoring the kicked-puppy noise he made. “One for you, one for Jamie, one for Juliet. Tea?” She laughed at the face Liz pulled. “No, thought not. Juliet?”

 

“Please,” Juliet said gratefully, and happily accepted a mug, adding sugar and milk to it and following Liz into Jamie’s room at her own, more sedate pace.

 

Five minutes later, she reappeared, still cradling her tea but with brownie crumbs around her mouth and called Nicky in, and even the grownups in the kitchen fell silent as Liz’s voice started up again, carrying the story to its inevitable conclusion.

 

***

 

            Lester stood in the door for a full two minutes before anyone acknowledged him; then Liz wound up the chapter and shut the book, marking her place neatly, and Lester watched the children disengage from another world, stretch and shift and blink, and only then did they turn to look at him. “Lunch,” he said. “Alison says you may camp out and eat it in here, provided you don’t spill or leave crumbs, but you do have to come and get it first.”

 

            Jamie smiled at Liz and held his arms out to her. “Carry me?” he asked, only half-joking.

 

            _Carry me?_

 

            Lester blinked, and plunged into memories. There had been a little boy who smiled at him and asked that once: a little boy two years old or so, healthy and strong with huge brown eyes and a magic smile, who reached imploringly up to his father or toddled over to him, seizing his legs at the knees and smiling winningly up at him, and asking _Carry me?_ and most times he’d laughed and swung the toddler up, to his shoulders where the boy grasped at his hair to cling on and giggled, or holding his son close to his chest, feeling him plug his mouth with his thumb and close his eyes, fall asleep against his shoulder, a furnace of heavy fragile warmth with a butterfly heartbeat.

 

Lester blinked again, and focussed on his son at thirteen. Jamie looked too frail; the clothes he was wearing were much too big for him, and Lester almost expected the light from the windows to shine through him, highlighting ivory bones and making thin skin glow. Quickly enough, Liz stepped forward and slung him over her shoulder, and perhaps only Nicky missed her tiny flash of horror at how easy it was. Liz was much stronger than most girls her age, and would probably have experienced more difficulty if she’d tried to carry Jamie in her arms without opting for a fireman’s lift, but it was still much easier than it should have been to lift him.

 

            “You’re upside-down,” Jamie commented untruthfully, upside-down and halfway to Liz’s ankles.

 

“Idiot,” Liz said lovingly, stalking through to the kitchen.

 

“All the blood is rushing to my head,” Jamie observed as Liz sidestepped Lyle, who grinned.

 

“Good, maybe you’ll get some thinking done,” his sister retorted, and dumped him unceremoniously in the armchair in the corner, where he curled up like a cat and laughed at her, making her smile reluctantly.

 

            “Children, children,” Theo said pompously, waving a salad-spoon and accidentally poking Ralph in the eye with it, extracting a barked swearword from his brother. “A little more decorum, if you please.”

 

            “Decorum yourself,” Ralph growled, wiping salad-dressing off his face and out of his close-cropped beard as Juliet, Nicky and Lester trooped back into the kitchen, where it was quickly becoming overcrowded. He seized the salad-spoon and grabbed a plate. “Mozzarella and tomato salad. Who wants?”

 

            “Me,” Nicky said, somehow appearing at the front of the crowd in search of food. “Thanks, Uncle Ralph, I can manage,” he added, and set out to prove this by piling his plate with most of the things set out on the table, from sausages to slices of baguette, and from cold roast chicken to a slice of quiche, although with a notable lack of vegetables; unfortunately for him, his mother caught him and added a helping of carrot and cucumber sticks to the plate. No-one noticed, because they were all too busy acquiring lunch themselves, and it took a good twenty minutes before everyone had got a full plate. Liz had got her own and Jamie’s early, and handed over one plate to the boy before perching on the kitchen counter to eat her own; Juliet filched a chair and pulled it over to sit close by her, and Nicky was already sitting on an arm of Jamie’s armchair, resisting Jamie’s half-hearted attempts to remove him and scoffing sausages at the same time.

 

            Kathy regarded them for a moment, feeling distinctly as if very clear lines had been drawn: not so much this is grownups’ business but this is children’s business. It was disconcerting, even more so to see the other adults seemingly unbothered; there was an obvious undercurrent of tense waiting under the happy normality of the scene.

 

            Lester arched an eyebrow at the little group. “I take it you’ve decided to stay here? We were going to go out into the garden; you can join us if you like.”

 

            “Depends how wet you want to get your feet,” that strange boyfriend of Lester’s noted, peering out of the window, where it had started suddenly to rain.

 

            Alison glared at the weather as if it had done her a personal disservice. “Bloody rain! Oh, well. Better stay in here, then...”

 

            There was whining, and ineffectual scrabbling at the kitchen door, and Lyle, who was nearest, opened it. A very wet dog trooped in.

 

            That was another thing, Kathy thought, choosing a chair and sitting down. James’s boyfriend, Lyle. He... concerned her. Where had he come from? James had said they’d met at work. What kind of job gave anyone the chance to get to know a soldier so well they started dating him, barring the MoD? (She was fairly sure James wasn’t working for them. If he had been, her security clearance would probably have covered the job.) The man was attractive, so much was obvious, but she knew James and she knew he could be quite picky: looks alone didn’t necessarily attract him, he liked his significant others to be smart and the kind of person who talked back, and this Jon Lyle looked very significant.

 

            Kathy was quite clear on one point, though. She wasn’t jealous of Lyle- she didn’t want James back, she didn’t want to be trapped in the painful suspicious nightmare that had been the death-throes of their marriage. What she was jealous of, what she wanted, was the easy closeness, the smiles ( _not many of those at the moment_ , she told herself and almost laughed), the warmth they used to have, before it all went horribly wrong.

 

            The love, she supposed. That was what she missed.

 

            “Are you okay, Mum?” Nicky asked softly, his voice pitched just low enough that nobody paid any attention and the other conversations spread around the kitchen carried on regardless.

 

            She smiled at him, and reached out to touch his cheek. He wrinkled his nose and muttered “Mu-um...” but didn’t pull away. “I’m all right,” she lied. “Oh, Nicky. You have mud all down your trousers.”

 

            Nicky crossed his eyes, and she tapped him gently on the nose. “Don’t do that. It’s bad for your eyes.”

 

            “Whatever,” Nicky mumbled. “Can I have another sausage?”

 

            “Ask your aunt,” Kathy said automatically, watching Jamie. He was chewing a piece of cucumber absent-mindedly and staring into the middle distance, his face blank, and a terrible look in his eyes- fear or emptiness or sorrow, she couldn’t quite tell –and then Liz nudged him gently in the ribs and addressed a comment to him, and he- it was as if he jerked awake, and he smiled and answered her.

 

            The hair on the back of Kathy’s neck stood up, and then she saw that Lyle was also watching Jamie, a tiny frown on his face. So she wasn’t the only one who’d seen that- well, that was good to know.

 

***

           

            “What was that about?”

 

            “What?” Jamie opened his eyes and looked at Lyle.

 

            Lyle folded his arms. “Earlier, during lunch, you looked... I don’t know what you looked like. I don’t really want to think about it. But...” He hesitated. “Do you want to die?”

 

            Silence fell hard to the floor and mushroomed slowly upwards, spreading like heavy mist, and Jamie’s eyes fixed themselves on Lyle. The soldier was taking his turn keeping an eye on Jamie while the boy rested; Juliet had prised Liz away with a kiss, a lot of coaxing and the promise of a kickabout with Nicky’s football to make her get some fresh air.

 

            Slowly, Jamie shook his head. “No.”

 

            Lyle sat back in his chair and stared at him while he searched for words, but Jamie hadn’t finished.

 

            “I... don’t want to die. No. But- there are worse things. Do you know what a bone marrow biopsy is like?” he asked suddenly. “It involves sticking a needle into your pelvis. It hurts. And then chemotherapy makes you sick, really sick. Ask Dad some time about all the times he’s held my head while I threw up... and it’s always been like that and when it hasn’t there’s always been the shadow of it hanging over me, I’ve always watched for bruises that look weird, wondered if that’s just where I fell over or if it means that the leukaemia’s back. It _sucks_. It _hurts_. If there’s anything I want it’s to go into remission and never come out but that’s not going to happen, I’ll be ill for the rest of my life, and I’m sick- sick of it-“ he was shaking, tone edging into sobs, but not crying yet- “And I can’t tell Liz this because I know I’m going to break her heart anyway and I don’t want to go and make it worse. I’m dying, it doesn’t matter what they do with drugs, it doesn’t _matter_ any more, this is just- the best way. The best way,” he repeated, almost sobbed, curling thin hands into fists, and then looked up at Lyle. “Do you understand?”

 

            “Yes,” Lyle said, and then hesitated. “Do you want me to fetch Liz? Or James?”  


            Jamie shook his head, and wiped his nose with his hand, just like any other unhygienic teenage boy except... not. “No. Don’t want them to see me like- like-“ He started to cry, gleaming tears edging cautiously down his cheekbones, and forced himself to stop.

 

            “Okay.” Lyle got up silently and took a tissue out of the box on the chest of drawers, and Jamie blew his nose loudly.

 

            He looked at Lyle again, a little forlorn. “It’s better this way. I know it is. It’s just that sometimes it’s really hard to believe it.”


	12. Chapter 12

            Outside, it was dark.

 

            Night had fallen slowly, inch by inch. The midday rainclouds had drifted away, taking away the unnatural storm-darkness, and the bright sunshine left behind, with its edge of a chill breeze and a kind of cleanness in the air after the downpour, had faded. The shadowed ghosts of clouds hung almost motionless in the sky, the whisper of a cold wind played around the house, turned back by double glazing and solid doors. It was quite still and quiet- quiet in a way it never was in the city.

 

            Everyone in the house was still awake. Theo and Alison were in the living-room, Theo sitting at the piano, playing softly, letting fingers linger on each phrase, thinking more than he played, the music a kind of background, a free-flowing, halting stream of sound. Alison leant over him, motionless, shining hair caught up into a loose knot at the back of her neck, resting most of her weight on the piano with one arm light across his shoulders. Neither moved when Kathy passed by, carrying a guitar that didn’t belong to her, and she paused in the doorway and thought of her youngest child trying out phrases and notes the way he did sometimes, sunk into the music, and thought _so that’s where he gets it from_. She looked at the guitar case she held, labelled NICKY BURKE in large defiant capitals, and remembered that it had been one of the first things he’d put his name to after changing his surname.

 

            She carried on into the kitchen, saw Ralph sitting with his feet up on the table –Alison would take him to pieces if she could see- and Lester and Lyle co-operating over the washing-up, bickering quietly without really meaning a single word they said.

 

            “Got Nicky’s guitar there, Kath?” Ralph remarked, nodding at the object in question.

 

            Kathy hated being called Kath, and she knew Ralph knew it; she also knew that, having caught a sizeable amount of flak when Lester had been wrecked from the divorce, he would not be averse to annoying her a little- he liked Nicky, not her. She bit her tongue. (No harm in manners. Nicky and Jamie would be upset if she started a row.) “Yes.”

 

            She moved on, towards the bedroom Jamie was in. She could hear Liz reading aloud, heard the hitch and crack in her voice and the brief pause while she took a drink of water, and carried on till she reached the end of the chapter. Jamie was lying in bed, half-asleep; Theo had given him painkillers only an hour ago, so he wasn’t in pain. Nicky was curled up at the foot of his bed, also drowsy, half-closed blue eyes fixed on the pattern of the quilt, Juliet was sitting cross-legged with her head resting heavily against Liz’s legs, and Liz was sitting on a chair, still reading.

 

            Nicky spotted his mother in the doorway, holding his guitar, and he sat up abruptly, eyes lighting up, then scrambled off the bed to take it from her, with a quick, one-armed hug and a ‘thank you’. Kathy smiled, and went to sit in the kitchen- normally she would never have done so, it would have been much too awkward, but she really wanted to hear Nicky play. Liz finished the paragraph, and said: “What’s that?”

 

            “My guitar,” Nicky said proudly.

 

            Juliet yawned, and looped an arm around Liz’s ankles, leaning more heavily against her. “I didn’t know you could play,” she commented.

 

            “I can,” the boy said happily, tracing the label on the guitar case. “I’ve been playing since I was eight.”

 

            Liz had known that Nicky played guitar, but she was damned if she knew when he’d started to. She did a little mental arithmetic, and realised that Nicky’s guitar lessons must have dated from shortly after her parents’ divorce. Oh. The arm around her legs tightened as Juliet came to the same conclusion, and Liz looked down and smiled absently at her, reaching down to tug gently at her plait and touch the back of her neck lightly.

 

            “I was wondering,” Nicky said, suddenly quite shy, “if... maybe when you finish reading, Liz- if I could play for you, Jamie? Like- I have sometimes,” he added, looking at Jamie as if he wanted Jamie to back up his story. “When you can’t sleep.”

 

            Liz felt her eyebrows raise, and she made a noise of surprise, which Nicky misinterpreted: she could see his shoulders hunch and his ears turn pink with embarrassment which would shortly turn to anger.

 

            “It’s all right,” Jamie soothed him, “she didn’t mean what you think she did. I’d like it if you played. He’s very good, Liz,” he informed his sister. “He practises all the time. Piano, too.”

 

            “I didn’t know you were that good,” Liz said. “Or that you played the piano.”

 

            “Yeah, piano too,” Nicky said. “But I only started that last year so I’m not so good. I like music,” he added defensively.

 

            “Never said it was a problem,” his sister returned. “So...” She looked at Jamie, and at how much of the book she had left to read. “What if I finish the chapter- two and a half pages, Nicks, it won’t take long –and you play for us then?”

 

            “That works,” Nicky agreed, and curled up at the foot of the bed again, hanging tightly onto his guitar. Jamie smiled broadly at him, and Liz took a deep breath and coughed; silently Juliet picked up the glass of water she’d kept by her and handed it up. Liz took a sip, gave it back and thanked her with a smile and a kiss on the cheek.

 

            “Liz and Juliet, sitting in a tree,” Nicky chanted, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G. In your own time, ladies,” he teased, imitating his father quite neatly.

 

            Jamie laughed, and Liz glared half-heartedly at Nicky, who grinned mischievously. “Cut it out, twerp.”

 

            “Minion!” Jamie said imperatively, and Liz stuck her tongue out at him, but looked down at her book and picked up from where she had left off.

 

            Soon, she finished, marked her place and closed the book, looking at her youngest brother. “Your turn, Nicky.”

 

            Nicky smiled almost nervously, took his guitar out of the case and cleared his throat. “Jamie, can you move a bit?”

 

            Obligingly, Jamie shifted over a little, giving his brother more room to settle himself and the guitar so that he could sit comfortably. For a moment, Nicky fussed over the tuning, and then he hesitated- and began.

 

            The first thing that struck Liz was that he was good, _very_ good. He must have some kind of natural aptitude, a feeling for music- she remembered him listening to classical music with their father as a very little boy when she wanted to play something noisy and competitive, and she knew that Uncle Theo was very good at music, had taken piano lessons and sang occasionally for fun, so he might have got the liking for music from there -and she suspected three years of diligent practice had probably not gone amiss.

 

            He was cautious at first, not sure what to play, but then he relaxed and grew more confident and toughened fingertips slid and danced over the strings, casually, easily, building a ribbon of sound that swelled and grew, spinning away from Nicky’s fingers, filling the air, winding out of the open door and stopping all conversation in the kitchen; its faint echoes reached Theo and Alison in the living-room, bringing Theo’s fingers on the piano to an abrupt halt, making them get up and go into the kitchen to hear better.

 

            In the bedroom all the children were rock-still, except for Nicky, head bent over the guitar, still playing. Whatever it was, Liz didn’t recognise it: it felt like Nicky had made it up himself, knew every note and phrase backwards and forwards, the exact timing, the beat of every bar. One of his feet was moving gently; if it had been on the floor, it would have been tapping the beat.

 

            Slowly, Nicky brought the melody to a stop, letting the last notes fall sweet into the complete silence. Liz stirred, and fought for words.

 

            “You are... bloody good,” she said slowly.

 

            “More?” Jamie asked.

 

            “Please, Nicky,” came a voice from the kitchen –Lester, Liz noted- and Nicky blushed, pleased.

 

            “All right,” he said, and struck confidently into the opening bars of a song Liz knew, played the introduction, and then-

 

            _All the leaves are brown... and the sky is grey._

 

            Liz twisted, astonished, and almost kneed Juliet in the head. That wasn’t Nicky singing, it was Uncle Theo, and how he knew the words to a Beach Boys song Liz wasn’t sure, but he was singing them quite happily.

 

            Nicky played the song out, from chorus to verse to chorus, and by the time it ended all the adults were standing awkwardly grouped around the doorway. Applause broke out, and he ducked his head, embarrassed.

 

            “Play me that one your teacher has you learning,” Jamie suggested.

 

            Nicky made a face. “That one?”

 

            “Try it,” Jamie persisted.

 

            And because no-one could refuse Jamie anything now, Nicky gave a martyred sigh and agreed.

 

            This song was sweeter, more mournful; not melancholy, but yearning, pensive. It was rather beautiful, but sad; delicate, the notes hanging in the air like crystallised mist, cool and gleaming.  It wasn’t a lullaby, more a ballad, and there were probably words to it, but Liz didn’t know them. She felt Juliet’s hand creep up to take hers and squeeze comfortingly, and watched Nicky at work, bent over the guitar. He might not like the tune much, but he played it very well indeed.

 

            However lovely it was, it struck a cold chord in her heart. It was a sad song- a very sad song. Whoever had written it, in a time long ago, must have loved someone and lost them. It was- well, it was wonderful, but Liz wanted it to be over, wanted it to stop, wanted to stop Nicky cold and make him play something happier, but she caught Jamie’s eye and thought better of it.

 

            Nicky finished the song, the last notes swirling and fading gracefully away into silence, and everyone was quiet.

 

            Then Alison made them all go to bed.   


	13. Chapter 13

 

            Liz woke up earlier than Juliet, she always did, but Jamie was awake before both of them.

 

Sleeping on the floor of his room, in separate sleeping-bags but still as close to each other as if there weren’t layers of sleeping-bag between them and with random cushions to rest their heads on –Liz bet Alison was fantastic at making dens and makeshift tents when she was small- neither of them slept well. It wasn’t that they weren’t comfortable, because they were, or that they were cold, because actually the sleeping-bags were almost too warm and Liz spent most of the night half out of hers. It was just that Liz was very, very aware of every laboured breath the boy in the bed took, and that Juliet knew it; she could feel the tension in the arm wrapped around her, the head resting between her shoulder blades. Liz was waiting, just waiting for a tiny hiccup in Jamie’s breathing, any hint that something was wrong, and if she found one she would be on her feet and standing by Jamie, blinking sleep from her eyes and asking what was wrong.

 

            Still, Liz slept, even if it was fragmented and restless sleep. She blinked awake around five o’clock, when Theo came in to give Jamie more painkillers, and listened to them talk softly; what she heard reassured her that Jamie was still alive and, really, no worse than he had been, so she curled around Juliet and drifted back into uneasy dreams she never remembered.

 

            At half-past seven Liz woke completely, and found herself unable to get back to sleep. Jamie was asleep again, she realised, listening to his breathing, and once she’d assured herself it was regular and steady, decided to wake up Juliet.

 

            “Ju,” she whispered, and kissed the sensitive skin just below the girl’s ear; Juliet’s eyelids fluttered, and she screwed them tight shut, an expression of extreme distaste passing across her face.

 

            “ _Ju_ -lie,” Liz said a little louder, grinning in spite of herself, and reached through the half-open zip of Juliet’s sleeping-bag to tickle her side. “Wake up...”

 

            That got a reaction. “No. Sod off,” Juliet moaned, and curled into a tight ball, facing away from Liz.

 

            “Get up, get up, get up,” Liz chanted, still tickling. Juliet wriggled and squeaked in protest, flailing at Liz with one arm.

 

            “You’ll wake everyone up,” she complained, catching Liz a decent whack on the shoulder. “It’s not time to get up yet. Piss off and go for a run or climb Mount Everest or something...”

 

            “Going, going, gone,” Liz said, with one last tickle for luck, and started to extricate herself from the tangle of sleeping-bag.

 

            “Evil bitch girlfriend,” Juliet muttered, dragging a cushion and a pink throw-thing dotted with sequins that had come from God knew where over her head. Liz grinned, fishing about for her jeans; Juliet’s reaction to being woken up never ceased to amuse her, and Juliet would have forgiven her by the time breakfast rolled round.

 

            Dressed, Liz went over to Jamie’s bedside and looked at him, and that made her smile go away. He was asleep- just about –with deep shadows under his eyes and an uncomfortable expression on his face. She reached out to touch his face, to comfort or calm him, but then let her hand drop. She might wake him, and he needed sleep.

 

            She walked out of the room, stepping carefully over Juliet, and went into the kitchen. She’d thought she smelled something good, and she had been right: Alison was busy mass-producing a cooked breakfast, bacon, eggs, toast and all, slightly hampered by her husband, who was making coffee. Uncle Ralph was not present, and neither was Nicky- the tent in the garden, pitched at eleven o’clock the previous night with many swearwords, barked shins and stubbed toes, showed no signs of life. Lyle was sitting at one end of the table, dressed as if he’d been out for a run, but Lester was not- probably still asleep, like Kathy.

 

            “Morning, Liz,” Theo said, and grinned at her. Spot, desperate for attention, barked and wagged his tail, sitting at her feet and looking soulfully up at her. Spot didn’t actually have any spots- he was a chocolate Labrador, if a very silly one –but Theo and Alison’s sense of humour demanded that a dog be named Spot, no matter what it looked like. Liz suspected extended exposure to the Spot the Dog books.

 

            “Hi,” she said, and filched a cup of coffee from under his nose; he made the predictable kicked-puppy noise, and she stuck her tongue out at him and wandered off to sit by Lyle.

 

            “Jamie all right?” Theo asked casually, apparently intent on carrying on a conversation with someone who didn’t want to talk.

 

            “You tell me. You were in there at five o’clock to give him painkillers,” Liz said, rather ungraciously, and buried her nose in her coffee.

 

            Theo’s smile faded. “Yeah. I know. I hoped I hadn’t woken you up...”

 

            “You woke _me_ up getting back into bed,” Alison muttered. “Those freezing feet of yours should be _outlawed_. Either that, or I need to get you some nice fluffy slippers. Move,” she added meaningfully, turning around with a pan full of sizzling scrambled egg, and wisely, Theo did.

 

            Juliet stumbled into the room, wearing grey tracksuit bottoms, a blue t-shirt, the matching grey tracksuit top and a cross expression. She flopped down into a chair by Liz and let her head drop onto the other girl’s shoulder. Liz put an arm around her shoulders. “I hate it when you wake me up,” Juliet mumbled. “I can never get back to sleep. Tickling is mean.”

 

            “Sorry,” Liz said, as Theo grinned and Lyle laughed.

 

            Juliet punched her, but only lightly. “I checked on Jamie before I came in. He seems... all right. Fast asleep. Snoring,” she added.

 

            “Good,” Liz said quietly, without the smile or laugh Juliet had hoped for, and somehow succeeded in sinking the relatively cheerful atmosphere into gloom with just that one word.

 

            The problem was the tension. It was always there, waiting, and all of them knew that if they stopped enjoying the little things –Nicky’s music, a joke- and acting almost normally, they’d be forced to accept that this was really happening, to acknowledge that they were there to watch Jamie die. It was more than slightly ghoulish, and Liz knew it better than anyone.

 

            Lyle broke the silence. “Eat your breakfast and go for a run,” he recommended to Liz. “You’re stir-crazy, sitting in here all the time. It’s pretty okay outside- looks like it’s going to storm, but maybe not for another few hours. And it’s a bit muddy.”

 

            “Apart from that,” Theo drawled, sipping his second cup of coffee and scratching behind Spot’s ears gently, “it’s a positive haven of beauty and loveliness.”

 

            Lyle grinned at him.

 

            “Sounds nice,” Liz said with perfect sincerity. “But...” She wavered, and a cloud of sadness passed across her face. “I’m not sure... Jamie...”

 

            “Use your brain,” Juliet said. “He’s not that weak yet.”

 

            “He’s not,” Theo said. “Professional medical opinion-“  


            “-yeah, the _allergy_ doctor-“ Liz, disagreeing.

 

            “-less of that, young lady. He has... a day. Two, maybe. Not long, but certainly long enough for you to eat breakfast and go for a run. Jon is absolutely right; you were not born to sit still, and you are doing far too much of it!”

 

            “You can’t make me go,” Liz pointed out.

 

            “No, but I can, and I will,” Lester said, as he came into the kitchen. He looked pale and tired as he sat down beside Lyle; Liz wouldn’t have bet on him getting any sleep to speak of the previous night. “It’s a good idea. If you don’t, I’ll tell Jamie you’re refusing to go out because you’re worried about him.”

 

            There was silence as the assembled company digested this. Liz was steadily turning redder with anger at the manipulation.

 

            “I don’t understand how you come up with evil plans that work,” Theo said thoughtfully, “but that one would.” He looked at Liz, and reconsidered the wisdom of that comment. An explosion appeared imminent.

 

            Juliet, hoping to avoid a storm, slid an arm around her and kissed her cheek. “Don’t,” she said softly. “Not worth it. Look, you can take your mobile, and- do you seriously think he’d let himself die without you there?”

 

            “He might not be able to help it,” Liz forced the words out, voice cracking on a squeaky note somewhere in the middle of ‘help’, and her head bent as if there was a heavy weight attached to it, tears sliding from the corners of her eyes. Juliet rearranged herself so that she was holding Liz properly.

 

            “He won’t,” she murmured, and wiped away the tears with a careful thumb. “Promise. I’ll even go out with you in the mud and not complain if we get rained on if you’ll just... believe me. It won’t do you any good to be bursting with energy you’d normally have used up while you’re- worrying. It’s not- going to happen. Not quite yet. You need to get outside, okay?”

 

            “But,” Liz said, and it wasn’t even the beginning of a sentence, just an almost wordless articulation of a fear Liz didn’t even want to name, of objections she couldn’t dress in words and make plain. Lester had turned away, not wanting to watch his daughter slowly falling apart like that, and close to tears himself; so had Alison, Theo and Lyle, feeling like they were eavesdropping on something private.   

 

            “Trust me,” Juliet said, and kissed Liz, just a brush of the lips, but lingering. In another time, Theo might have made a joke about it, but not now.

 

            Liz sniffed, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “All right,” she conceded, and leaned forward towards Juliet to hug her. Juliet hugged Liz back, and passed her the coffee. Her own –barely touched- had got cold.


	14. Chapter 14

            The morning moved on. Liz and Juliet ate breakfast and went out for their run, Liz with her mobile phone turned on and tucked into her pocket, just in case. People took it in turns to check on Jamie, every five minutes or less, or just when they got worried, and Lyle could see Theo strung tight, watching like a hawk for any change in the boy’s condition. Lester said nothing, eyes haunted, and he stuck close to Lyle’s side.  Ralph and Nicky extricated themselves from the tent, and Nicky accused Ralph of snoring. Kathy, silent and weary-looking, picked at her breakfast and spoke quietly to Alison: Nicky went over and gave her a clumsy hug, then vanished into the garden to kick his football about, an activity which didn’t require him to talk to anyone.

 

Jamie woke up.

 

            It was immediately apparent that he was weaker than he had been the previous day, and in more pain. Dark bruises bloomed under his pale skin where no-one had touched him, he was paler and more fragile, and he asked Theo for more painkillers not long after he woke up. He was very tired, and they all spent as much time with him as they could, Nicky sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed, playing his guitar and discussing football - he knew Jamie wasn’t really interested, but anything to keep him listening and paying attention, instead of drifting off, his eyes far away – Lester drawing with him, Kathy just talking to him, about books or music or whatever crossed her mind.

 

            Liz and Juliet came in eventually, flushed from the exercise, muddy to the knees and a bit wet from the shower of rain that had caught them just as they reached Rose Cottage, and Liz had to be dissuaded from tramping straight through the house to see Jamie. “No,” Alison said firmly, “shower first,” and Lester backed her up, so Liz had little choice but to detour into a hot shower and a set of clean clothes. It may have been the fastest shower in history, and Liz came downstairs still slightly damp, Juliet’s yelled order not to start reading before she got there ringing in her ears.

 

            She went through into the kitchen with absent-minded good mornings to the people she’d not seen before she went out, and only paused unwillingly for a very short time, to explain to her father that she’d taken a longer route than she’d actually meant to and had almost got lost, which was why she and Juliet were so late back. Then she disappeared into Jamie’s room.

 

            Without saying a word, Lester leaned against Lyle’s shoulder, his grip on Lyle’s hand tightening suddenly, and Lyle felt the other man turn his face into his shoulder, hiding it, hiding the tears that both of them knew were going to soak his t-shirt. With difficulty, he extracted his hand from Lester’s and put the arm it was attached to around the man instead, to hold him better. At the ARC, people would stare and giggle uncertainly if they saw Lester like this, as if it was so strange and out of the ordinary it had to be some kind of really bad joke that wasn’t funny any more.

 

            He saw Kathy turn away, stiff and uncomfortable with her tea mug clasped between her hands, and get up to go out into the garden, and Juliet come tearing into the kitchen with her wet hair tied up in a rough bun and almost crash into her. “Sorry!” she gasped. “Liz hasn’t started- oh good, no she hasn’t started reading yet. Is Nicky already in there?”

 

            “Yes,” Lyle said, and watched Juliet’s eyes flick to him, the sympathy flooding her eyes when she saw Lester, although she tactfully said nothing. “He was playing, a few minutes ago.”

 

            As if to confirm what he said, there was the sound of guitar strings twanging inharmoniously, expressing their owner’s displeasure with the situation, and a complaining voice, saying something about _Juliet_ and _slow_. Unembarrassed, Juliet merely grinned and darted into the bedroom, where louder cries of “At last!” and “Get lost, did you?” greeted her.

 

            With her departure, the kitchen lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.

 

***

 

            Liz slipped into the room and nodded to Nicky, then went to sit on the edge of the bed by Jamie. She didn’t speak for a moment, just took one of his hands and held it for a while, lightly, like she might hold something very precious and very fragile, and then turned it over, feeling along the big veins in the wrist with her thumb until she came to the point she wanted and held her thumb there, waiting. Jamie’s pulse bumped under her finger: weak, but regular and steady.

 

He rolled his eyes at her with a faint smile: “I’m still here, you know,” he said gently, although his voice was softer than it had been, and she could hear him breathing, heard its laboured tone. He was so thin and so pale, she thought, although his eyes were bright and lucid, but there was that edge of sadness to their expression that made her heart shrink, pained.

 

“I know,” she whispered, and felt her voice crack.

 

Nicky bent his head to his guitar, the corners of his mouth turned down and his eyes troubled, and flicked the thinnest string with a fingernail. It thrummed gently, a high sweet sound.

 

Liz leant forward and kissed Jamie’s forehead, folding her arms carefully about him, feeling his heart thump in his chest, hearing his breath, warm and regular and rasping, by her ear, and then let him go. He had bruises on his arms, bluish-black stains on the almost white skin, and she knew he was tired and only not in pain because of the painkillers Uncle Theo had given him, and that he could eat barely anything and wanted less. She had seen his strength worn away, little by little. She remembered him in the all-too-short periods of health, and cried to see him reduced so; she knew the kind of pain that chemotherapy, radiotherapy, the endless treatments and diagnoses had put him through. She understood the choice he had made.

 

That did not mean she didn’t wish it undone; that she didn’t wish for a clean slate, for a God or a- or a- she didn’t _know_ what, she’d never been religious, she didn’t _care_ what, for some kind of supreme being to take it back, to go back and unwind the threads of leukaemia and pain from Jamie’s life, make him the healthy, cheerful child he could have been. For that, she would quite happily have paid with her own life.

 

Damn it, she thought as Jamie tch’d and reached for a tissue to wipe away the tears sliding down her face, it wasn’t _fair_.

 

“Hush now,” Jamie said quietly. “Are you going to read to me?”  


“Juliet asked me to wait for her,” Liz said, sniffling in an undignified manner, taking the tissue away from Jamie and blowing her nose fiercely.

 

“Fair enough.”

 

“Where’s Juliet got to?” Nicky complained, restless with the emotional intensity in the room, and twanged the strings on his guitar in a manner calculated to make his long-suffering teacher wince. “She’s being so _slow_.”

 

On cue, Juliet slid into the room with a bright smile for all of them, although her eyes darted around the room, taking in the suppressed, only-just-under-control grief. Liz smiled waterily back and picked up _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ once more; returning to her seat on the chair by Jamie’s bed, she began to read.

 

***

 

            For the rest of that day it was like a special kind of darkness had fallen on the house. Although it was relatively sunny outside, the clouds passing across the sky in stately slow motion, inside it was dark and subdued, the atmosphere painfully close and stifling. It was the waiting that broke them. It would have been so much better if it was quick, if he just... fell asleep and never woke up again, in no pain, without those ghoulish bruises, the desperate frailty. But thinking that felt wrong, as if they were willing him to die.

 

Liz, reading her way to the end of the book, felt her heart churning agonisingly. He had chosen this- it was better than a chemical-filled, wearying death in a sterile hospital, she told herself. Every argument she had used on her father, every argument Jamie had used on her.. it made no difference, no _difference_ , she was letting her brother waste away and die without finding some way to fight it, and that went against every ingrained instinct she had, because Liz had always fought for Jamie before. In the playground when boys mocked him for liking art and being polite to teachers and girls, or tried to push him around because he was skinny and not as strong as they were, or made cruel jokes about his leukaemia, Liz had fought for him. If they were taller than her or looked bulkier than her she didn’t care, she had just attacked, clawing and punching and swearing revenge, until everyone at school had a healthy respect for Liz Lester and the wrath and fury she brought to bear on those who hurt her little brother. She had stayed with him when their mother’s relatives had tried to make a pet of him or pity him, guarded him from their stupid questions or the pity that had made Jamie squirm unhappily, and was rude to them until they went away in a huff. She’d slipped into his room late at night in the bad times when their parents argued, stayed with him until the argument stopped or they both fell asleep, promised him it would be all right, even though they had both known the words meant nothing. She had threatened bullies, scrapped with cousins, snuck into his room to sleep with him when he was feeling very sick and just wanted a hug. She had fought for him, tooth and nail and fists and feet.

 

            And now he had asked her to let him go, because now it hurt too much and he’d had enough, and she had said yes, and Liz Lester never broke her word - but it was pain like she’d never known, not fighting for him, and it tore her to pieces.

 

            She kept reading, there in the quiet and the semi-darkness, while the occupants of Rose Cottage felt their nerves fray under the pressure; they didn’t know if they were supposed to grieve yet or not, but there it was, a growing sore of sorrow on their hearts, a flood they barely held back. Ralph, tough as nails and plain-spoken, struggled to articulate what he felt, just held Jamie’s hand so tight that Jamie had to remind his uncle how easily he bruised now; James Lester, always ready with an apt comment, was lost for words, beset by one of his worst nightmares. Theo divided himself between his piano and his nephew, Kathy hid in her room to cry, refusing to let Lester see her like that, Alison clung close to Theo. Shadows grew in the house, a kind of unearthly twilight that deepened inexorably as the day wore on, because Jamie was weakening, the last of his strength slipping through lax fingers like sand rushing from an hourglass. His breathing became more laboured, rasping through his throat; Theo gave him an oxygen mask, and put a drip into his hand, and went back out into the kitchen to warn his brother and ex-sister-in-law that he’d had to do so.

 

            In and out of that room people came, all through that long day where time seemed to move slower and hearts grew cold, as they waited, numbed, for the last blow. Theo came in at regular intervals, his face blank and professional, to check pain levels, the drip, the oxygen mask, temperature, pulse, breathing; monitoring the agonisingly sluggish descent of a teenage boy into death. Others would slip in just to sit and listen to Liz read, to hand over a snack for those who would not leave, to watch, imprint on their memory the last recollections of Jamie they were ever going to have, to hold his hand or touch his face for comfort - whether his or theirs, no-one knew.

 

Liz’s voice cracked and became hoarse, and she took a break briefly, gulping down coffee while Nicky took over, running through guitar melodies, slivers of recognisable theme-tunes and songs, and then sliding into chords, broken notes, until Liz started to read again.

 

            And all the while, the hands of the clocks in Rose Cottage ticked round, the lethargic hands counting down the remaining seconds... minutes... hours of Jamie’s life.

 

***

 

            Lyle found Lester in the garden. The other man had quietly got up and left Jamie’s room twenty minutes ago, and Lyle had let him go and given him a good head-start before following him. He wasn’t in the kitchen, their room, the living-room or the bathroom; finally, Lyle had gone out and looked in the garden, and there he was. He was deliberately sitting out of sight, leaning against a tree and staring into the middle distance, apparently uncaring that the ground he was sitting on was damp and the seat of his jeans was probably soaking up dirt like a sponge - most unlike the usually fastidious James Lester. Spot the dog was sitting beside him, thumping his tail happily as Lester scratched mechanically behind his ears; the animal was exceedingly dim, but not blind to the choking atmosphere inside the house, and was in fact refusing to come inside.

 

            Lyle sat down beside his boyfriend. Lester was drawn and white, the toll this was taking on him clearly visible, and he didn’t speak for the first few moments. Neither did Jon. The quiet hung in the air between them, unspoken words drifting gently.

 

            “It’s not fair,” Lester said softly after a moment.

 

            Lyle did not reply.

 

            “Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia has a high cure rate in children.”

 

            Still, Lyle said nothing. The silence stretched for longer this time, and then Lester observed to the empty air: “If I could take his place, I would have done it a long time ago.”

 

            Words Lyle couldn’t say crowded on his tongue, choked his throat, and he swallowed hard and put an arm around Lester’s shoulders. Lester almost clung to him, arms winding around his waist, face turned into his neck - Lyle could feel tears there. “I’m sorry,” Lester muttered after a moment.

 

            “Sorry for what?” Lyle asked, trying to soothe him.

 

            “Sorry you got... mixed up in this. It’s not your grief. You shouldn’t be stuck here.”

 

            Lyle tightened his hold on his boyfriend, and bent his head to kiss the back of the man’s neck. “Shut up, idiot.”

 

            Lester almost laughed, and Lyle mentally notched up a small victory. He knew there was worse to come.


	15. Chapter 15

            “Liz,” Juliet said softly, nodding at the boy in the bed, and Liz looked up from the book for the umpteenth time, her eyes flicking across to Jamie.

 

            “What?” Nicky demanded, voice worried and frightened, trying to keep it down so as not to disturb his brother, but Liz was watching Jamie, and the blank, set look on her face chilled both Nicky and Juliet to the bone. It had been two minutes or less since Theo was in the room, checking the boy’s vital signs, but Jamie was visibly worse, listless, his breath fainter, fighting still for every molecule of oxygen.

 

            “Nicky,” Liz said, “Go and fetch Uncle Theo, _now_.”

 

            Nicky laid his guitar aside and went without a murmur, and Juliet felt the hair rise on the back of her neck as she recognised the artificially calm and cool tone Liz reserved for mortal danger. Liz put the book down and crossed silently to Jamie’s bedside. He turned his head to look at her, but did not smile, and she picked up his hand again, finding the pulse in his wrist; it was weaker than it had been, and more erratic.

           

            Liz heard hushed, hurried footsteps, and Theo entered, his face grim, and went straight to Jamie with an encouraging smile. Jamie returned it feebly, and Theo took off the oxygen mask. The boy answered Theo’s queries in his thread of a voice; a crowd of family tried to pile in, and Theo’s head whipped round and he subjected them to a ferocious blue glare. “Stay _out_ , the lot of you.”

 

            The horde retreated, piling back out into the corridor, but Liz made no move; just stood by Jamie’s bedside as Theo unhurriedly went through the same rituals as before, pulse, temperature, breathing, and spoke to Jamie for a few moments before getting up and proceeding purposefully into the corridor, sweeping the multitude squashed into the narrow corridor before him. He looked a lot like her father, suddenly. In the corner of her eye, Liz saw Juliet waver for a while, and then follow him out.

 

            Theo stood in the kitchen, and spoke. He kept it brief, perhaps a minute’s succinct and brutal breakdown of the crisis Jamie was undergoing. It was as if he had no eyes for the shattering blow every word dealt his brother James or Kathy wilting wordlessly into a kitchen chair, as if he didn’t care enough to soften his speech when he saw Nicky white and drawn, his fists closed and his mouth pinched in an effort not to break down and sob. Jamie was dying, he said flatly, and wouldn’t live to see the morning; it was time to say goodbye. They were not to crowd him, and there were to be no arguments or strife about anything in Jamie’s hearing, nor would any attempts be made to resuscitate him; he had asked for peace, and he was going to get it.

 

 

            In the bedroom, Liz had drawn her chair closer to the bedside, and was sitting on it, leaning close to Jamie. “Hey,” she said quietly, her fingers moving lightly over his cheekbones, tapping his nose; he focussed on her, and managed a faint smile.

 

            “Liz,” he whispered behind the oxygen mask, and fixed his eyes on hers, tying himself to life for a few more hours.

 

 

            Outside, darkness was falling.

 

 

            Juliet drifted into the room, Theo following her with a firmer step and taking up a guarding position next to the drip. The girl went to the same side of the bed as Liz, and bent over Jamie, flipping her plait over one shoulder. “Jamie,” she said gently, and waited until he looked at her, then kissed his cheek and hugged him.

 

            Jamie reached out, fingers shaking, and took her hand. “Look after Liz for me,” he said in that same whisper, and smiled a little.

 

            “Yes,” Juliet said, and squeezed his fingers lightly, then disengaged. She leant towards Liz now, who looked up at her as if startled. “I’m here,” she murmured, and touched Liz’s face gently.

 

            “I know,” Liz answered, and Juliet left the room quickly, passing out into the kitchen.

 

***

           

            “How much is there... left?” Jamie asked Liz, struggling to speak.

 

            “Of the book?” Liz queried, and when Jamie nodded feebly, she picked it up and checked. “A page and a half, and the epilogue.”

 

            “Read me... the epilogue later,” Jamie said, and paused to breathe, fighting to take in air, and Liz closed her eyes, feeling the little sharp spikes it sent into her heart.

 

            “Jamie, there will be no later.”

 

            “Redefine... later,” Jamie countered, speaking laboriously. “Wherever... you read it for me... I’ll hear.”

 

            Liz swallowed, and opened the book, finding her place. She blinked to clear her eyes of the tears that threatened, and picked up the thread of the story again, carrying it on to its end.

 

***

 

            In the kitchen, Nicky’s head shot up. “She’s reading,” he said in disbelief. “Without us!”

 

            “As it should be,” Juliet said, curled in the kitchen armchair.

 

            Nicky bounced up, full of righteous indignation.

 

            “ _Sit down_ ,” Juliet ordered, glaring at him.

 

            “You can’t tell me what to do-“ Nicky began, and tried to move off, but he had sat too close to Juliet for his idea to work and in a flash she was out of the armchair and had forced him back into his seat; Kathy moved to protest, and then Alison leant over to her and whispered something and she subsided slowly, wearily. In the meantime, Nicky was quite stuck in the chair. Juliet was a dedicated ballet dancer, fit and wire-strong, and Nicky’s mild enthusiasm for football didn’t make him strong enough to break her grip.

 

            “Yes, I can,” Juliet said, still eerily calm, knuckles white and pink with the force she exerted, long fingers immovable. “Leave them be. You can hear from here.”

 

            Nicky huffed, and relaxed grudgingly, and Juliet returned to her seat. In the bedroom, completely unaware of this, Liz continued to read. In the kitchen the clock struck the quarter hour, and Spot whined and shuffled in his basket.

 

***

 

            Lyle squeezed Lester’s hand and got up to go into Jamie’s room when he heard Liz’s voice trail off. The door was still open, and he hesitated in the doorway, watching the pair. Liz shut the book, one finger keeping her place just in case, and smiled sadly at her brother. “The End,” she said.

 

            “Finally,” Jamie said weakly, and reached out for his sister’s hand. “We got there in the end...”

 

            “Are you sure you don’t want me to read the epilogue?” Liz asked, a little frown between her eyebrows

 

            “Yeah... sure,” Jamie repeated, and his eyes closed briefly. “Honest, Liz... too tired...”

           

            Lyle’s lips thinned and his jaw set. He could almost see the boy slipping away; he was sure Liz could too. He moved further into the room, and went to stand by the bedside. “Jamie?” he said.

 

            “Yeah?” Jamie replied. His eyes were closed; after a moment he opened them, and with an effort turned his head to look at Lyle. There was very little of the spark of intelligence and mischief that had characterised them, that had brought life and animation to the thin face even just the day before; it was clouding over as Jamie lost himself in a fog of weariness.

 

            Lyle stared down at him. This made him deeply uneasy; thirteen-year-olds were not supposed to die. They just weren’t. And still, here Jamie was, a perfectly blameless, unusually mature but otherwise normal boy - dying.

 

            Jamie coughed. “Uh... hi?” he said slowly, apparently under the impression that Lyle had been struck dumb, and it was almost funny.

 

            “Hi to you too,” Lyle said, running a hand through his hair. A behavioural specialist might have read the action as symbolic of nervousness, uncertainty of what to do next; Lyle would almost certainly have told them to piss off and analyse someone else, but that didn’t make it untrue. Short on both ideas and time, he fell back on formula. “It was good knowing you,” he said, voice more gentle than a lot of petrified subordinates and alarmed civilians would ever have believed it could be, and cautiously grasped the boy’s hand.

 

            Jamie summoned a feeble but genuine smile. “You too. Don’t... let Dad... stagnate.” He spoke carefully, occasionally pausing for breath, and Lyle restrained a wince at the roughness of his breathing. It sounded painful, and probably was. Lyle glanced at Theo, still standing in the corner watching Jamie. The man’s lips were compressed, his face grim, but he did not move to make Jamie put on the oxygen mask.

 

            Then Jamie surprised Lyle by reaching out his arms for a hug. Lyle leant down – Jamie was too weak to sit up - and embraced him gently. He could hear the boy’s weak heartbeat, and the fitful restless heave of Jamie’s chest as he fought for breath.

 

            Lyle let him go, lowering him properly back onto the pillows. “Bye,” he said, and Jamie just nodded, as if he hadn’t enough energy left to speak more. He was fading now, and Lyle doubted that he’d even be able to make the same confession as he had earlier, about having chosen the least hated of two options when he asked to be allowed to die.

 

Lyle paused at the door, looking back into the room at Liz and Jamie, still figures in the semi-gloom, and went out.

 

           

 

            Liz registered little of the remainder of the goodbyes; she was too focussed on Jamie, almost in a trance. She did not react when Kathy almost started to cry, and had to hurry out, or to Nicky, choking out his words and searching in vain for hope; not even to her father’s silent brokenness. She barely noticed the footsteps in or out; she was deaf to the words her family spoke, or a touch on her shoulder, the suggestion that maybe she, too, should speak and leave, from someone who thought better of it. She did not hear the furious, stifled altercation when Kathy sent Nicky upstairs, away from Jamie, to fetch something, and she did not register Nicky coming in to take his guitar away.

 

Theo, standing in the corner as if he was on guard, made no comment.

 

            At last, she stirred and spoke, and saw Jamie’s half-closed eyes flicker open. “We’ve said it all already, haven’t we?”

 

            “Ye-es,” Jamie breathed. “Liz...”

 

            “What?” she asked him, and bent closer to listen.

 

            “When... I’m gone...”

 

            “Don’t!”

 

            “When... check... my sketchbook.”

 

            “Your sketchbook?” It shocked her out of her trance for a moment; the incredulity was plain enough in her voice, and it made Jamie laugh, a sad little whisper of a thing.

 

            “Will... make sense.” A long pause. “Promise.”

 

            Liz nodded in agreement, and reached out to touch her brother, to cup the side of his face in one hand; the contrast between brother and sister, frailty and strength, was almost painful. He turned his face into the touch, and she held her hand there for a moment, and then moved it to rest lightly on his chest, above his heart, waiting to feel it beat.

 

            _Duh-duh...    Duh-duh...   Duh...duh. Duh... duh._

 

            Weak. And slow. And growing weaker.

 

            “Out...side,” Jamie whispered.

 

            “What?” Her voice was half-choked with tears.

 

            “Out... side... stars.”     

           

            “You want me to take you outside? So you can see the stars?”

 

            A nod. A feeble jerk of the head.

 

            “Uncle Theo?” Liz said softly. There was no question as to whether she would do it or not.

 

            “Here,” Theo answered, and came quietly across the room to unhook the drip, putting a sterile dressing on the mark left behind out of habit. The oxygen mask Jamie had only worn sporadically, and had removed to speak.

 

            “Can you carry him?” Theo asked his niece. It was a stupid question, and he did not wait to hear it answered, just went out into the kitchen where the lights had been switched on, leaving Liz to wrap her brother in a blanket and lift him.

 

            “Jamie has asked Liz to take him outside,” he told the people in the kitchen. They were awkwardly grouped around the kitchen table, the adults on chairs, Nicky on the floor paying equal amounts of attention to that guitar of his and Spot, deliberately occupying himself in order not to give in to tears.

 

            “But,” Kathy said slowly, a woman with something on her mind, “won’t that...”

 

            “Won’t that what?” Theo enquired, but there was no snap to the query; it just was. He shrugged.  “Jamie asked. Are you going to tell him no?”

 

            Kathy shook her head.

 

Nicky got up and went out into the garden, still carrying the guitar which hardly ever left his sight. Spot followed him. In the kitchen, the clock struck the hour and Alison began to cry.

 

Liz wrapped Jamie carefully in one of the blankets and lifted him up, cradling his head against her shoulder. It was much too easy, but her mind, deadened and dumb, only waiting for the last blow, wasn’t shocked by the lightness of the burden. She carried Jamie out through the kitchen, past the watching faces – at this point, if asked, she could not have put a name to any of them - and out to the garden. She did not notice Nicky sitting on the bench beside the door, guitar resting next to him but untouched, the strings quiescent.

 

It was like stepping into another world. There was very little noise; no cars passed along the little road that ran past the front of Rose Cottage at this time of night, and the neighbours, warned, were hushed respectfully. The sky was quite clear, a velvet blanket stretching from horizon to horizon with the very last light fading away in the west in its own sweet time. Above brother and sister the sky was deep, deep blue, almost black, and the stars shone in it, studded deliberately here and there in the familiar patterns, shining brightly, beating back the night. A breeze rustled the trees fitfully, their leaves and slender branches cut out in darker shadow, sharp relief against the sky, picked at the corners of Jamie’s blanket, ruffled Liz’s hair. The cool air smelled like woodsmoke, in that strange way British air does sometimes, even if there has been no fire – much less one involving wood - within a mile.

 

Liz, barefoot, padded across the patio and onto the grass, chose a spot to sat down and did so, craning her neck to see the stars. She felt Jamie work a hand free of the blanket and curl it into her t-shirt.

 

“Better?” she asked.

 

“Yes,” Jamie whispered. His breathing was even rougher and raspier than it had been before, struggling to get enough air, but he was sliding into peace now, shutting down.

 

“Best...” he forced the word out, and Liz frowned, not understanding; she could feel his heartbeat again, hear his breathing, and most of her was only paying attention to that.

 

 

_Duh... duh... Duh... duh..._

 

Inhale. Exhale.

 

 

“Best... sister...” He fought for one long breath, and confided: “Love... you...”

 

 

_Duh...  duh...  Duh...  duh..._

 

Inhale. Exhale.

 

 

“I love you too,” Liz said, and bent over him, holding him tighter as tears slipped out of her eyes and trailed down her face, chilled by the wind.

 

 

_Duh...   duh...   Duh...   duh..._

 

Inhale. Exhale.

 

 

“Love you... all...”

 

 

_Duh...    duh...   Duh...   duh..._

 

 

Inhale. Exhale.

 

 

_Duh...      duh..._

 

 

_Duh...._

 

Exhale.

 


	16. Chapter 16

Gentle hands prised Liz away from Jamie and tugged her towards the house. Blinded by the tears pouring from her eyes, she fought the hands for a moment, the sound of Jamie’s last breaths and his slowing heartbeat ringing in her ears, and then gave in. Juliet wrapped an arm around her, under her arms, trying to lift and support her, but Liz was heavy, tallish and solidly built, and she didn’t want to move. Looking back into the garden, Lyle could see the blanket-wrapped body, pitifully small in the shadowed darkness of the night, and James and Theo kneeling over it. Kathy was standing nearby, looking down at it and crying, hands loose and helpless by her sides.

 

The opening bars of the same song Nicky had played before shivered into the night air, faltering, and then the song halted, and Lyle glanced at the musician. He was bent over his guitar, shoulders shaking, hand paused on the strings, fingers trembling. He threw his head back, and blinked up at the sliver of a moon, as if he was trying to compose himself, and the silvery light glittered on the tears on his face. Evidently the ability to hide from the real world in music had just failed him.

 

Lyle turned away again, back to Juliet, who was trying to persuade Liz to move and having little success. “Here,” he said roughly, and lifted the teenager up; heavy though she was, she seemed as strangely reduced as Jamie did, except that she was pitifully alive, shuddering and sobbing in his arms.

 

He took her into the sitting-room as preferable to sleeping in the room that Jamie had shared with her and Juliet, and laid her down on the largest and most comfortable of the sofas with a cushion under her head, and stood over her for a while until Juliet came back, towing their sleeping-bags and belongings behind her; the moment she returned, he went out into the garden again, moving as fast as he could.

 

To his relief, James Lester was where he had left him. Although the garden had emptied slowly - Ralph and Theo had carried their nephew’s body inside, Kathy had gone indoors presumably to avoid being alone with her ex-husband and to mourn in peace, and Nicky was in the tent still pitched in the garden; he had a torch on inside, and Lyle could see his silhouette, printed cleanly on the blue fabric – James had remained outside. He was standing, quite motionless, and looking up into the sky; the faint breeze plucked at his shirt and ran cold fingers through his brown hair.

 

Lyle stepped up behind him, and wrapped his arms around the shorter man. For a moment, Lester was unresponsive, and then he leaned back against him, one hand reaching up to touch the encircling arms.

 

“Has Liz gone to bed?” he asked, and it was the same iron, perfect control of his voice he’d used when Oliver Leek was torn to pieces live on camera. It was disturbing, unless you knew that it was fake right through, whether it hid tearing grief or a desire to be very sick indeed.

 

“Sort of,” Lyle replied, drawing his boyfriend as close to him as possible; the other man was only wearing a thin shirt and trousers, and with the breeze still whistling fretfully about the countryside and the chill of the evening, he must have been quite cold. Still, he probably didn’t even notice that in his current state of mind; Lyle was more concerned about making sure James knew he was there and ready to listen to him if he wanted to talk, hold him if he wanted to be held, or just be there if that was what he needed, although he’d have been horribly embarrassed if anyone had told him that was what he was doing.

 

There was a very long silence. Lester was tense in his arms, controlling something, tears or grief or what, Lyle hadn’t a clue, and he was just gearing up to say something stupid like ‘you can cry if you want’ when Lester suddenly spoke.

 

“It doesn’t feel... real.”

 

He couldn’t see James’s face, but as he closed his eyes and bent his head so his cheek brushed James’s, bringing them as close together as it was possible to be while still fully clothed, Lyle knew that the other man would be blinking rapidly, his jaw set in an attempt to control himself.

 

“It doesn’t feel like... he’s gone. I said goodbye to him, I touched the- the- body-“ Lester almost spat the word out, and took a long shuddering breath afterwards, forcing relative composure on himself- “but... I- I can’t believe... He was diagnosed when he was four. Nine years- nine years he fought this, not counting the remission, and I _can’t_ believe that he just lost, just like that. It- it isn’t fair,” he said, sounding exactly like his daughter, and then he almost laughed. “Life isn’t fair. But- I can’t believe that he isn’t in a hospital with a sketchbook in his hands, bored stiff when he runs out of pages, sick, but alive and fighting, and with a chance of a cure- small, but a chance. The doctors used to be so optimistic; ALL- acute l- lymphoblastic leukaemia- the, the kind of- of leukaemia he had- it’s... It has such a high cure rate in children. But it kept coming back, and the doctors ran out of hope, and Jamie ran out of hope, but I can’t... I can’t believe it.”

 

He spoke restlessly, the words tumbling from his mouth in fits and starts as he found the phrases to fit to what he was trying to express, and with more and more difficulty as he came to the end of his explanation; by the last sentence he was having to force the words out. It was almost like the way Jamie had talked, in short bursts, except that his voice had been a thin whisper and Lester’s voice was still clear and strong, if choked with grief, and he was not struggling just to breathe, to get air into his lungs.

 

Then, he sort of coughed, a bitter sob, and started to sob. Not the furious, powerless tears his daughter had shed, nor the keening, grieving wail of the bereaved that had drilled the lieutenant’s ears more times than he cared to think of; no, these tears just slipped down his face, endless, silent, all-consuming and even more horrifying than noisy, chest-racking sobs. This mute expression of sorrow seemed to say that hope had betrayed it, faith had failed it, death had destroyed it, and there was nothing left to say, no words to rail against the world with, because there was just no _point_ any more. There was nothing to be said, no condemnation to deliver. It was over, it was ended, there was nothing that could be done.

 

Silence, Lyle decided as James Lester stood in his arms and cried, was the sound of a breaking heart.

 

“Come on,” he said after a while, and somehow - he never remembered how afterwards – got Lester inside. The open door of Jamie’s room yawned wide; Lyle’s eyes flicked involuntarily away from it and he blocked it from Lester’s sight as they passed: up the stairs, into the bedroom, open curtains rustling, a soft murmur of background noise. Lyle could see the stars shining impassively in the night sky outside, and felt a quick burst of revulsion. He let Lester sit down on the bed, and went quickly over to close the curtains; he almost ripped them off the rings by accident.

 

Behind him, still sitting on the edge of the bed, Lester had taken off shirt, trousers, shoes, socks, and now his head was in his hands and though the tears had mostly dried up, they both knew they would be back. Lyle himself stripped down to t-shirt and boxers and lay down on the bed, pulling Lester down beside him, curling around him with Lester’s back against his chest. “Go to sleep,” he said quietly, and Lester nodded and then shifted, turning over so that he faced Lyle. Blue eyes, blinking with the last of the first wave of tears but steady, met his.

 

“I’m sorry,” Lyle whispered, and the eyes squeezed shut briefly as Lester nodded again, then pulled Lyle into as crushing a hug as he could manage with one arm.

 

“Thank you,” he said, and then they were quiet, and eventually, they slept.


	17. Chapter 17

At six o’clock exactly the next morning, Liz Lester blinked into wakefulness, and it occurred to her to wonder why she was lying on a sofa with her head and most of her torso hanging off it, and why Juliet was asleep on the floor; and then the events of the previous day came rushing in on her, and she closed her eyes and wished she was asleep and oblivious again.

 

Life does not work like that, and therefore, after a few minutes of trying to go back to sleep, Liz got up carefully, stepping over Juliet’s ankles, and rummaged through the weekend bag Juliet had dragged in and the clothes piled on top of it. Liz stripped off the clothes she had been wearing - Juliet had taken off her jeans and shoes, but left it at that – and put the clean ones on, piling the others to one side for washing later, and that was when she saw the book.

 

Juliet had presumably not liked to leave it where it had been left in that dark room with the curtains closed and the last of the futile medical apparatus lying about, so she had taken it out and left it by Liz’s bag, the place still marked. Liz picked it up, and turned it slowly over in her hands.

 

_Read me the epilogue later..._

 

Liz Lester had an idea.

 

She went over to Juliet, knelt down and shook her shoulder gently. “Jules... Julie.”

 

“Mmfrghl _no_ ,” Juliet moaned.

 

“It’s okay... you don’t have to get up. I’m just going for a run, okay? Taking Spot for a walk. I shouldn’t be too long. An hour, less, maybe.”

 

“’kay,” Juliet mumbled, rolling onto her side and peering sleepily at Liz. “D’you want me to come with you?”

 

Liz shook her head. “Not if you don’t want to get up.”

 

“I’ll go back to sleep, then,” Juliet said, and promptly closed her eyes. Liz kissed her cheek, tugged the blanket over her, and straightened up. She picked up a small backpack and a water bottle, filled the latter from the kitchen sink, and put it in the bag along with an apple. She then slung the backpack onto one shoulder, put food into Spot’s bowl and ignored him while he wolfed it down as she wrote a quick note and left it on the kitchen table, then took Spot’s lead down from its hook. The dog got up and pattered over to her, claws skittering on the tiles. He woofed experimentally.

 

“Ssh, Spot,” Liz murmured, and fastened the lead to his collar. “Yes, walkies - shut up, you’ll wake everyone in the house...”

 

She took a set of keys and let herself out of the front door, and in the bag on her back rested the solid weight of one copy of _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_.

 

 

            Liz did not know the area very well, but she was familiar with it, and it wasn’t as if she intended on doing anything very complicated; she was just looking for a decent-sized hill without anyone else on it. The area around Rose Cottage, close to Salisbury Plain, was full of rolling hills and green grass; it was the land of white horses, carved into the chalk by no-one knew who, no-one knew when, of ancient barrows and fortifications covered over by peaceful layers of soil and grass. It wasn’t so much hilly as bumpy, with large areas of relatively flat land, and steep valleys and tall hills. Liz ran out of the little village Rose Cottage lay in, and headed for one of these hills; it was one of the routes Alison and Theo regularly took Spot for walks on, so Spot knew the way and followed it.

 

            After the clarity of the day before the weather had clouded over. The sky was pale pearly grey as far as Liz could see, but it didn’t seem to threaten rain, and the breeze had acquired strength and become a somewhat stiffer wind that plucked at Liz’s loose hair and ripped at her t-shirt. Ignoring it, Liz and Spot left the road, climbing over a stile half-overgrown with nettles and hopping into a patch of triumphantly squelchy mud which coated the hems of Liz’s tracksuit bottoms and slathered the soles of her trainers. They then went around the field, over a stile, through another field and out of that field onto a hillier area, tussocks of grass making it very uneven terrain to walk or run on: Liz slowed to a walk, and, instead of following the well-used footpath on the flattest ground, cut across the ground, heading directly for the tallest of the hills ahead, scaling several hillocks on the way. Spot, who had been let off the lead, went in almost the opposite direction, though he always whirled back to join her, leaping and bouncing energetically around her.

 

Liz made no attempt to stop him until he bounced off to go to fraternise with a small Scottie dog being walked by a family: the small children trailing behind, who looked tired and bored, were startled by Spot, and clung to their father. Liz called Spot to heel, and smiled at the family, noting that the mother striding cheerfully ahead was the only one who really smiled back. Spot returned quickly, and Liz told him to sit - she had not forgotten to take the treats Theo and Alison used – and gave him one of the little biscuits when he did so. Spot trotted obligingly at her heels for a while, then began to prance and leap around her as she finally reached the foot of the hill and began to climb it. It was steep, and heavy work on her muscles; but Liz was a lot fitter than most teenagers, and in her current frame of mind she barely noticed the strain.

 

            At the top she stopped, took the water bottle out of her bag and drank from it, looking around. She was thirsty, and quite hungry, since she had not had any breakfast and they had all missed dinner, so she took out the apple and started to munch that. It was a good thing Spot had already had a decent run, and had burnt off most of his energy; Liz told him to sit and stay, and gave him another treat, then continued to watch her surroundings.

 

            Apart from the family with the Scottie dog, which had come to a standstill some way away and were apparently arguing, and a very hardcore runner who had passed Liz before she’d even started to climb the hill and was now a speck in the distance, Liz had seen nobody else. She finished off her apple, eating all of it except the stalk and the seeds, although she found a large bruise which she had to bite out. She kept watching the area, looking down on the surrounding countryside. Later in the day there would be more people, but it was not yet half-past seven and –after the runner had completely vanished and the Scottie dog family had crossly taken themselves off in the direction of either home or their parked car - the place was quite empty.

 

            At last, with a pat and a quick scratch behind the ears for Spot, who was showing unwonted patience and keeping a greedy eye on the bag with the treats in, Liz sat down and took out the heaviest item in the bag - the book. She opened it at the marker. This wouldn’t take long; the epilogue was relatively short, only a few pages.

 

            Liz swallowed, and began to read aloud to Jamie for the last time.

 

            At first it was hard and she stumbled over phrase and sentence, comma and full stop, running her words together, speaking too fast and then too slow as she tried to read aloud, but then she found her way into the same comfortable groove of speed and tone she’d been using for years, her reading becoming far more fluent and comfortable. The words floated out into the open air, were snatched away and dispersed on the draughts and whispers of the wind, pouring freely out into the world, but spoken to only one person.

 

            Liz reached the last word of the last sentence and hesitated before closing the book. “The End,” she announced for the second time, and shut it finally with a snap, feeling rather as if she was going to cry. Spot, who had been shuffling and making little noises that were meant to indicate that he was bored and it would be good if the silly human could find something else to do, licked her ear almost apologetically, and, taken by surprise, she jumped and squeaked in a most un-Liz-like way.

 

            “Stupid dog,” she muttered, wiping off her ear and grimacing, but got up and put the book away in her bag before slinging it over her shoulders. “All right, let’s go home then,” she said aloud, and began to make her precarious way down the hill, followed eagerly by Spot. The sun had come out a little, shining weakly through the veil of cloud, and at the bottom of the hill Liz stopped to squint up at the fuzzy-edged circle of light, then, blinking away the nebulous dark fluorescent shapes left floating aimlessly in her vision, turned to peer up at the summit where she had sat. And it seemed to her that there was a vaguely person-shaped silhouette on the top of the hill, where she had been sitting, and the hair rose on the back of her neck; but Spot didn’t seem to be at all bothered as animals were supposed to be by the supernatural, and when she blinked it was gone, no matter how hard she stared.

 

_Wherever... you read it for me... I’ll hear._

 

            “Must’ve been a spot from looking at the sun,” Liz told herself pragmatically, puzzling a rambler just within hearing range, and checked her watch. Eight o’clock exactly and she’d be back by half-past - people would be awake and they might be worried. Dismissing all thoughts of funny-shaped spots on the vision, she set off towards Rose Cottage.

 

***

 

            When Liz got back, crunching over the gravel in the drive and inching past the parked cars, she was startled to be greeted by Nicky, who had been sitting on the roof of his uncle’s car, looking out for her.

 

            “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, jumping down.

 

            “Out for a run. What does it look like?”

 

            “Half the grown-ups think you’ve gone off to top yourself,” Nicky said flatly, matching pace with his sister as she opened the front door and scrubbed her trainers on the mat, allowing Spot to race ahead of her into the kitchen. “’Specially Mum.”

 

            “What? Bollocks!” Liz snapped, and was almost drowned out by the noisy and relieved greetings of her family. She took off her trainers and made her way into the kitchen, disregarding them, and saw Juliet curled up in the armchair, cradling a cup of tea and quite at her ease.

 

            “What’s this bullshit I hear about you thinking I’d gone off to commit suicide?” she demanded of her family, dropping her bag onto the floor. “For God’s sake, Julie, didn’t you tell them I’d gone out for a run? And I left a blasted _note_. And why the hell would I have taken Spot with me if I was going to off myself?”

 

            “Nicky exaggerated a bit - it was Nicky who told you that, wasn’t it? There was just a slight question that you might have done something rash,” Lester said, omitting to mention the fact that when Lyle had woken him with the news that Liz had left the house alone he’d checked Liz’s luggage to see if her Swiss Army knife was present, and had been enormously relieved when Juliet had sighed, pushed him aside and rifled ruthlessly to the bottom, producing the object in question. None of the kitchen knives were missing and he was certain that Liz would have used her own knife were she going to self-harm. “After yesterday-“

 

            “Yes. Right. _What_ ever. Seriously, do you not know me at _all_?” Liz blustered, pretending not to take the point; her father was right, after Jamie’s death – she flinched mentally - her sudden disappearance early in the morning before anyone else was awake would have alarmed people. “I promise I’m not going to kill myself. It’s not even as if I packed my bloody knife.”

 

            “I told you it was a mistake,” Juliet said with mild self-satisfaction to Lyle, who was standing on the opposite side of the kitchen to Kathy and occasionally shooting her filthy looks. “She always leaves it lying around. She must have forgotten to unpack it from the last time she brought it-“

 

            “Yes, thank you, Juliet,” Liz sighed. “Give it here, please.”

 

            “What makes you think I’ve got it?”  


            “Give it up, you _so_ have.”

 

            Juliet grinned, put down her tea, and got up to go over to Liz, producing the knife from her pocket and handing it over. Liz stuffed it into her own pocket, and treated the company at large to an indiscriminate glare. “Now, if the _mass hysteria_ over a perfectly innocent excursion is over and done with...”

 

            “Relax,” Juliet said soothingly. “They weren’t that freaking out. They were just worried.” She hesitated. “You didn’t see yourself- last night.”  


            “What?” Liz said, frowning at her. “Did I do something stupid? I don’t- remember,” she said, her voice breaking uncertainly when she said she didn’t remember. She remembered too much.

 

            “No. You just-“ Juliet struggled for words, and Theo bounced helpfully into the breach.

 

            “We didn’t know how this was going to affect you.”

 

            Liz stared at him. “You thought I was going to kill myself because Jamie d-“ she hesitated, and then forced the word out- “died. Fuck _off_!”

 

            “Language!” her parents snapped in unison, and she curled her lip automatically, suddenly closely resembling her father.

 

            “How pissed off would Jamie be if I- followed him? He’d send me right back with a flea in my ear! And I like being alive too much, anyway. I promise. No suicide. No self-harm. Now can I go and have a shower?” Liz said crossly, verging on shouting.

 

            “Go right ahead,” Nicky assured her, pinching his nose with a mock-disgusted expression. “You smell manky.”

 

            Liz flipped him the bird, and stamped, muttering towards the room she, Jamie and Juliet had slept in, only for Juliet to sidle neatly into her path, spin her round and push her in the opposite direction, with a grin and a cheerful ‘wrong way!’ before she realised where she was going.

 

            Lester waited until she’d gone to smile slightly, although there was little joy in it. “She’ll be all right.”

 

            “I know,” Kathy muttered. She had been most worried and least willing to accept Juliet’s verdict that Liz had just wanted a run, and felt Lester’s comment to be somewhat pointed: she had been genuinely anxious for her daughter, and was now a little embarrassed that she’d been so drastically proved wrong. “I was just worried.”

 

            “We’ll all be all right,” Ralph said, ignoring Kathy, and he drained his coffee and quirked an eyebrow at his brother. “In time.”

 

***

 

            Liz had been through the shower and was dressing in the sitting-room, hair still dripping wet, when there came a knock on the door. “Who is it?” she yelled, and pulled her shirt over her head.

 

            “Me. Juliet,” came the voice.

 

            “Come in.”

 

Juliet came in, and observed Liz wandering around the room, looking for something.

 

“What did you do with my jeans?” Liz asked without preamble.

 

“I’m not totally sure,” Juliet said thoughtfully, and joined the search. Eventually they found them, and Liz put them on. They faced each other for a moment, and then, without saying a word, Juliet stepped forward and hugged Liz. Liz leaned against her, her own arms wrapping around the smaller teenager, and hid her face in Juliet’s hair.

 

“Are you all right?” Juliet asked, her voice somewhat muffled but perfectly audible.

 

Liz considered this; she swallowed, and when they separated she would have to wipe away a suspicious wetness at the corners of her eyes, and her voice wavered a little when she spoke. “No-o.” She paused, and her arms tightened around Juliet. “He’s- gone. Just- not there. And there’s a- a space where he was that I don’t think... I don’t think I’ll ever fill. It _hurts_.”

 

Juliet stayed quiet. Liz was not, as a rule, one to spread her feelings around or discuss them overmuch, and this needed to be said. Accidentally putting her off was definitely something to be avoided.

 

Liz closed her eyes. “I’ll be- okay. Not right now, but- some day, okay? And no cutting or anything, I promise.”

 

“I didn’t believe that,” Juliet assured her, grinning, as they broke apart and Liz flopped down onto the sofa; she joined her, curling up against her side and keeping loose hold of her hand. “Look, let me tell you what happened.”

 

Liz looked attentive, a little frown between her eyebrows.

 

 Juliet took a deep breath and began to explain. “It was just that your mum got so worried and it sort of... infected other people. She thought- because you and Jamie were so close and you were so different... You didn’t see yourself last night, you were a wreck. You cried so much you barely saw me and I don’t even think you knew me or Jon. Jon brought you out of the garden and left you here - he needed to go and look after your dad – and we slept on the sofa... It took hours for you to stop crying, and then you fell asleep so deeply you didn’t even wake up when I fell off the sofa. You were - so unlike yourself – I don’t think any of them knew what the hell you were going to do next. And then your mum had to go and get up early and notice you were missing, and _of course_ she didn’t wake _me_ up to see if I knew where you were, she just went looking for you. Jon was the only other one up, he’d already found your note, he thought you’d just gone out to walk Spot like you said, and she absolutely flew at him when he told her so. They had the row to end all rows, except really quietly. Your mum called him a fool for thinking you’d only gone off to do what you’d said you were going to do, he told her she ought to trust her daughter more and that you wouldn’t do a thing like that, she obviously didn’t know you, she said he didn’t know you either... and all in nearly a whisper because they didn’t want to  wake anyone else, but Kathy knows zilch about walking quietly or keeping her voice down and I was already half awake, so I heard them and got up. Both of us told Kathy you wouldn’t do anything like that, but she wouldn’t listen to us. She insisted on waking your dad, so Jon did it to stop her bothering him. If she’d had her way there would have been search parties out for you, but luckily she listened to Alison, who told her none of the kitchen knives or anything else you could use to... you know... was missing and you probably didn’t have your own knife to do anything like that with. But your dad said that you might have it, so I went through your bag and checked... it was there, obviously. Not with you. So we all just waited.”

 

“Hm.” Liz’s hand closed on the knife in her pocket, and she took it out, examining it, the familiar weight light in her hand. They were a family tradition; a thirteenth birthday present, with the birthday boy or girl’s initials engraved on it. What you did with it differed from person to person: Uncle Theo used his to open stubborn packages and wine-bottles, her father had put his somewhere very safe and never touched it, and Uncle Ralph always had his in his pocket. Liz kept hers around, and always had it with her in the country, but tended to leave it on her desk or in a drawer and forget about it in the city; this time, she must have forgotten to unpack it from her last trip out of the city. Jamie, sensitive to his mother’s attitude to this particular family tradition, which was that giving any kind of knife to a thirteen-year-old was never sensible, had only ever used his own once or twice and out of Kathy’s sight - and that had been for sharpening pencils.

 

Juliet took it from her and looked it over, fingers passing over the casing and the initials EAL, hooking out the little scissors attachment and snipping the air before handing it back. She glanced up into Liz’s face, blue eyes deadly serious. “It was almost plausible, Liz, you know that. How much you cared for Jamie, how much you hated letting him go. Everything was so different from normal nobody knew how you might act. You wouldn’t have done it, but even I could almost believe that you could have done.”

 

Liz shook her head. “I never even thought about it, I swear.”

 

Juliet snuggled against her, clinging hard, and it occurred to Liz that it had frightened Juliet to see her out of control. “I believe you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “What were you doing?”  


“I went out for a run and I took Spot with me,” Liz said patiently, unwilling to disclose the full truth to even Juliet just yet, and especially reluctant to discuss a small matter of funny-shaped spots on the vision that might or might not be supernatural in nature.

 

“I would be so much more inclined to think that was the whole truth,” Juliet told her, very muffled, “if I hadn’t seen a shape in that bag of yours that looked an awful lot like a book. You went out to read the last bit out loud, didn’t you? The epilogue?”

 

Liz laughed, a short startled almost-bark. “You know me too well.”

 

“Thought so,” Juliet said smugly, looking pleased with herself for having made Liz laugh. “How’d it go?”  


“It was all quiet, so there wasn’t anyone to give me odd looks,” Liz said, more comfortable with speaking now that Juliet had guessed most of it. “And it... yeah, it went okay. I took water and everything so I didn’t lose my voice. And there was...”

 

She hesitated. Juliet prompted her with a nudge of an elbow. “There was...?”

 

“Something- weird. Promise you won’t make fun of me?” She sounded defensive already.

 

“’course not,” Juliet reassured her, toying with the hand she held captive, and Liz squeezed her hand in thanks.

 

“Well, when I got to the bottom of the hill I was reading on I looked at the sun, just, you know, because... Just _because_ , and I looked back up at the hill where I’d been sitting and I saw, sort of... those things you see when you look at the sun only it was bigger than usual and kind of shaped like a person and... yeah,” Liz ended weakly, reddening.

 

“It probably came from looking at the sun,” Juliet said logically. “Were you worried it was a ghost?”

 

The look on Liz’s face said: _Yes. No. Maybe?_

 

“Does it matter?” Juliet asked, and twirled a piece of Liz’s wet hair around her finger absently.

 

Liz paused. “No. Not really.”

 

“I didn’t think so either.”

 

They stayed like that for a moment, quiet and at ease, and then Liz stirred and addressed the mantelpiece in studiedly neutral tones: “Jamie told me to do something before he... went.”

 

“What?” Juliet enquired, surprised.

 

“He told me to check his sketchbook.”

 

There was a brief silence while Juliet digested this, not entirely sure what to say.

 

“There must have been a reason,” she concluded after a while, and extricated herself from the comfortable tangle of legs and arms, climbing off the sofa and offering Liz a hand up. She took it, hauling herself out of the depths of the sofa.

 

“Let’s go and get you some proper breakfast,” Juliet said. “And then we can have a look at that sketchbook of Jamie’s.”


	18. Chapter 18

Liz and Juliet’s re-entry into the kitchen reminded everyone - except Nicky, who had already been thinking hopeful thoughts about eggs and bacon – that none of them had yet had any breakfast, and Alison muttered something colourful and strode over to the fridge to examine the supplies; having eight guests in the house had put a certain amount of strain on the larder. The house exploded almost sheepishly into activity, as if everyone was embarrassed by the high drama of the morning and thought moving would exorcise it, and the sore spot that was the closed door to the room Jamie had slept in and the absence of Jamie’s face and voice ached in all their hearts. Nicky, Ralph and Lyle were all packed off, complaining, to the nearest supermarket to buy eggs, bacon, orange juice, bread and milk in industrial quantities, Theo, Kathy and Lester went to make arrangements that were carefully not specified around Liz related to Jamie, and Liz, Juliet and Alison remained behind, sipping coffee and discussing ballet and CCF and anything - anything – that  had nothing to do with Jamie.

 

It was hard for Liz, sitting there and talking, with Jamie always in the back of her mind, and she knew it was going to be hard for a long time. Still, she was now sure of something that she hadn’t been at all convinced of before; it might take a while, and the funeral was going to be a total ordeal, but she’d be okay. Reading the last of the book to Jamie had... helped, somehow. Even the weird shadow thing she’d seen that, to be honest, probably meant no more than that it had been stupid to look up at the sun- that had helped. She felt a lot calmer now.

 

She could see concern that she was going to fall apart writ large in Alison’s greenish eyes, and offered the older woman a small smile; she didn’t feel up to a proper one yet. Her stomach rumbled, and Juliet stopped discussing the finer points of ballet and giggled.

 

“You wouldn’t be hungry, by any chance?”

 

“Me? Never,” Liz said.

 

Alison smiled slightly. “The boys will be back from the supermarket soon- oh. Talk of the devil...”

 

There was the sound of a car parking itself in the drive, and people climbing out of the car and slamming the doors. The three in the kitchen got up and went outside.

 

“How was the trip?” Alison enquired, folding her arms and watching Lyle load Nicky down with bread and orange juice before sending him to take it all into the kitchen.

 

“Lousy!” Ralph said succinctly. “Traffic had to be seen to be believed. Bunch of old biddies and families with squalling kids trolling around the supermarket, too, always just where we were trying to get something, and there was a bloody _flasher_ in the supermarket!”

 

“Oh dear,” Alison said. “What did you do?”

 

“You mean what did Nicky do. He asked the man if he wasn’t cold, wandering around dressed like that, and then he went and told the security guards.”

 

“Good lad!” Alison smiled. “No harm done, I think.”

 

The rest of the conversation passed Liz by, as she went to help take things out of the boot. Lyle glanced at her, and asked quietly: “You okay?”

 

“For a given value of ‘okay’,” Liz admitted, accepting a pot of strawberry jam and two packets of bacon. “Look, there’s something important. Before-” she hesitated- “well... Jamie told me to check his sketchbook.”

 

“Check his sketchbook? What?”

 

“That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t in a mood to, you know, say anything. He probably had a reason.”

 

Lyle nodded. “After breakfast, maybe.”

 

Liz nodded as well. “Yeah. When Dad and Mum are back.”

 

She turned and went back into the house, and Lyle looked at Juliet. “She’s doing well.”  


“Yeah.” Juliet shrugged. “When she went out this morning it was to read aloud the last of that book. She didn’t read the epilogue before Jamie... died, so she just took it outside and found a place to read and read. I think it... I think it helped.”

 

 “Hmm.” They both looked back at the open door of the house.

 

“Closure,” Juliet commented matter-of-factly, took a box of eggs, and vanished into the kitchen.

 

***

 

Over breakfast Liz acquainted the rest of the family with Jamie’s cryptic remark about sketchbooks, and it was decided that they should follow it up. So, after breakfast had been finished and the washing-up concluded, someone thoughtlessly asked Liz to fetch the sketchbook, forgetting that it would be in the room where Jamie had died. She flicked an involuntary glance at the door - firmly closed - and blanched.

 

“I’ll go,” Nicky volunteered quickly, and slipped into the bedroom and out again in double quick time, returning as white as his sister, but with the black sketchbook clutched in one hand.

 

“I’m sorry,” the someone said, but was totally ignored in the switch of focus to the object in Nicky’s hand. The boy slid into a seat at the kitchen table, and everyone began to coalesce around the sketchbook, dragging chairs from where they’d been doing duty as ladders to the higher cupboards or holding files of lesson plans, without even having to call anyone in to stop what they were doing and come and see.

 

Nicky pushed the sketchbook out into the centre of the table, towards Liz, and Liz, still very pale, recoiled involuntarily. “ _No_.”

 

Juliet’s hand on her shoulder tightened. She had seen Liz abseil, cave, scuba dive, handle a rifle and face a, a, well, a _something_ \- Miss Lewis had been very clear that it wasn’t a dinosaur, Ed Mackenzie had been just as clear that it was, and Juliet was not disposed to take a position on the matter – without flinching, and now she couldn’t touch a sketchbook; because it had belonged to her adored brother, and he was dead.

 

Lester glanced around the table. No-one seemed inclined to touch the sketchbook, and in an ordinary case he himself would quite happily have packed it away and never looked at it again. But Jamie had told Liz to check it, and he must have had a reason. Still, he understood Liz, pressed against the back of the kitchen chair, only slowly relaxing. It was like touching a flame with a burnt hand, when you knew it might burn down a house if nobody put it out; you knew it had to be done, but you knew it was going to hurt, too.

 

He reached out, pulled the sketchbook roughly towards him and flipped it open. Everyone craned to see.

 

The sketchbook was two months old and half finished; Jamie had had the strength to draw until the last few days of his life, and the latest drawings dated from four days previously. Quick sketches of friends and family, of objects, one painstaking silhouette of the London skyline, illustrations from the chapters Liz had been reading to him. Kathy blinked, and blinked again, a new shine in her eyes; her lips compressed and the hand resting on the table clenched, nails biting deep into soft palm.

 

And then Lester flicked over a page and came at last to blankness; and that was infinitely worse, more utterly final, than anything drawn by Jamie’s hand. They stared at it for a long moment.

 

“I don’t understand,” Nicky said at last. The grand gesture had fallen flat; Jamie had gathered them together from beyond the grave, to see- what? A final testimony? None of them knew - but something that meant something, that had a purpose. But there was nothing there. It was funny, in a dark and ultimately despairing kind of way.

 

Liz shook her head. “Me neither,” she admitted, and picked up the sketchbook herself. There was nothing new in it, so it was no longer something to be afraid of.

 

She held it and started to go back through it again, and several white, flat, rectangular objects fell out into her lap from where they’d been tucked into the back pages, making her start, drop the sketchbook and use several very bad words learnt from the ARC’s contingent of Special Forces.

 

“ _Elizabeth_!” her mother almost shouted.

 

“Oh, Liz,” her aunt sighed.

 

“Not bad,” Ralph conceded judiciously. “Jon, did you tea-“

 

“Not guilty,” Lyle said, restraining himself from crossing his fingers to negate the blatant lie.

 

“They’re addressed,” Lester observed, voice as calm as he could make it, as he helped Liz fish the items off the floor. “I think they’re letters.”

 

The brief chaos of the moment deflated.

 

“I gave him that notepaper to write thank-you letters on,” Kathy said, strangely detached with her voice wavering, picking one up. “Nicky, this is yours.”

 

Nicky accepted it gingerly. The white envelope had the kind of blue and red border usually used on airmail, and was addressed in Jamie’s immaculate joined-up writing to ‘Nicky (Nicholas) Theodore Burke’. There could be no possible doubt as to who it was for. There were others too, addressed with the same almost nit-picking accuracy, one for everyone at the table. Nicky ripped his open, got a papercut, swore, was hissed at by his mother and started to read regardless. Theo fished out his Swiss Army knife and opened his, his wife’s and Ralph’s without being asked, and Lyle had already done the same for his own and Lester’s with a rather more lethal-looking knife casually produced from somewhere. Kathy reached for the kitchen scissors, and found Juliet had got there first.

 

Liz’s lay unopened in front of her, the teenager’s arms folded across her chest as she slouched back in her chair. Juliet nudged her gently, and raised her eyebrows at her, but Liz did nothing. Left alone, she sat rock-still and unmoving while the letters played out their dramas on the faces of those reading them, while tears bloomed in the corners of eyes and sadness filled expressions.

 

“Liz-“ Lester began questioningly, surprised by her attitude, and got a poisonous glare for his trouble.

 

“I don’t think I want to even _touch_ it,” Liz said. Her face was not stony, but the faint tilt of the head away from the letter, the troubled eyes fixed on the letter and uncertain line of her mouth all screamed her aversion to the letter before her.

 

There was a long silence produced by a lot of people deciding that maybe now was not a good time to ask why.

 

“If you don’t,” Juliet said, the first line of her own letter running through her head (‘ _first things first: try to get Liz to read her letter, seriously!_ ’), “you’ll just wonder what it says, and that will hurt more.”

 

“Won’t. I don’t want to know, okay?”

 

“Liar,” Juliet murmured, eyes firmly fixed on her own letter.

 

It felt as if the temperature in the room had plunged.

 

“I’m not lying,” Liz said finally, softly, but there was a steel in it very few people could safely ignore.

 

“Prove it,” Juliet said evenly.

 

“How?” Liz demanded. “I shouldn’t need to! You _know_ I wouldn’t lie to you!”

 

“Yeah, but there are people in here you would lie to without even thinking about it. You could just have talked to them. There’s nothing to say you weren’t just talking to them.”

 

“Fuck you!”  Liz snarled, cheeks burning with fury.

 

Juliet didn’t raise her eyes from the note in her hands, but if Liz had been watching closely enough she would have been her knuckles whiten, her shoulders tense, even as the flippant rejoinder poured off her tongue. “Not till you hit sixteen, sweetie, and does it look like August to you?...”

 

Liz’s chair hit the floor, and the back door hit the wall, as Liz stamped barefoot out into the garden. Juliet picked the chair up off the floor and sat down on it, paying no attention to the eyes on her.

 

Lester sat back in his chair, his own letter lying open on the table before him. None of them were very long, some only a few sentences, but Lester’s was among the longest - always presuming that the few addressed to Burke relatives, untouched in their envelopes, weren’t longer. “I’m not sure if that was inspired or incredibly stupid, Juliet.”

 

“Inspired. I hope.” Juliet sighed. “Look... this way, Liz sits out in the garden for half an hour, and probably gets, you know, kind of wet... ’cause it’s raining now. Maybe hits something. Not a person, more likely a wall. Anyway, she’ll cool off, and I’ll say sorry, and then she’ll read the letter.” Juliet stretched out her legs, and eyed her toes. There was blue glittery nail varnish on them. “She’ll be cross for days,” she admitted. “There’s sod-all I can do about that.”

 

“You could not have said it in the first place,”  Kathy pointed out sharply.

 

Juliet met her eyes. “And then she wouldn’t have read the letter. She’d have put it away somewhere and never touched it again except maybe to hide it, and she’d be hiding it but she’d really be hiding _from_ it because she’s scared.”

 

“Yes,” Lester said, and took up his own letter, turning it over in his hands. His jaw set. “It hurts, and she’s afraid of it hurting.”

 

“Liz, afraid of pain?” Kathy said, a certain amount of scorn in her voice. “James, are we even talking about the same girl?”

 

“Emotional pain,” Lester said frostily. “Not physical. To be honest, I know exactly how she feels. If you’ll excuse me.”

 

 

He got up and went out. Lyle followed him. Nicky muttered something and fled, his letter crushed in his hand. Slowly, the kitchen emptied; it was now as uncomfortable to be in the same room with the others as it had been reassuring to be together.

 

Juliet remained.

 

***

 

            “Most people,” Lyle commented, flopping down onto the bed and watching James Lester standing by the window and holding his letter, smoothing the paper automatically, eyes fixed on his son’s handwriting, “would try not to pick a fight with their girlfriend, boyfriend, partner or whatever.”

 

            “Juliet is different... Juliet and Liz are different... although I do think she may have... overreached herself a little here. And she has a point. Jamie would have known that, too.” Lester sighed, and put the letter down. “He had amazing handwriting,” he said quite randomly, but it was obvious that he was talking about Jamie. “The best in the class - always. Much better than Liz’s. God knows why.”

 

            “He was pretty amazing,” Lyle said. “Even I can see that.”

 

            “Yes. He was.”

 

            Lester went over, and sat next to him on the bed. “If I could have switched places with him...” His hands were folded again, one hand wrapped over a fist, elbows resting on his knees.

 

            “I know,” Lyle told him. The idea made him sink his teeth into the inside of his cheek to stop himself saying something stupid; his mind revolted from the idea of Lester dwindling away to nothing as Jamie had. It wasn’t hearts-and-flowers sentimentality; nothing about them ever was. It was just that when he faced the idea, he thought _No, never_ , and there was an end to it. It wasn’t allowed to happen. He wouldn’t let it.

 

“Yes.” Lester leant against him, his hands uncurling, shoulders relaxing. “Oh, God. What would I do without you?”

 

“Explode?” Lyle suggested, and grinned mischievously at him. Lester rolled his eyes.

 

“No, that’s what happens when you’re around.”

 

“Oh, come on, sweetie, you know you love it.”

 

Lester snorted, but half-heartedly, as if on automatic.

 

They didn’t speak for a while as they settled on the bed, Jon half-lying, half-leaning against the bedstead with Lester in his arms. Then Lester said matter-of-factly, his face invisible to Lyle: “I’m going to miss him for a long time. Forever, even. There will be bad days, and worse days. It will be... painful.”

 

“I know,” Lyle repeated, and ran a hand through his boyfriend’s short hair, wishing he could see the expression on his face. “I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere.”

 

Lester leant up with some difficulty and kissed him, and they lay together for a long while without speaking. After a few minutes Lester found himself blinking away tears, and felt Jon’s arms close tight round him.

 

“Still here,” Jon said, and Lester nodded, for once lost for words, and was comforted.

 

***

 

The kitchen door swung open. Juliet looked up at the dripping wet figure, hands shoved stubbornly into her pockets, dark hair turned almost to black by the water and plastered to her forehead, but brown eyes still burning sullenly. She might have been crying. It was raining too hard outside for anyone to tell.

 

At last, Liz spoke. “I wasn’t lying.”

 

 

“Admit it.”

 

More silence, and then Juliet sighed and got up, but did not move towards Liz, still standing in the doorway, motionless but for the dripping of water from her hair and clothes. There remained a tension in the room, bitter and harsh, and it had to be dispelled - and soon.  


“You weren’t lying,” Juliet said. “I was. I’m sorry.”

 

Liz looked hard at her for a few moments more, but the tension was leaking away, from face, shoulders, atmosphere. She really hated being called a liar. “All right,” she said gruffly, and the last of the tension melted into mist.

 

Juliet stepped forward and kissed her, and Liz put her arms around the smaller teenager, feeling the relief in every line of her girlfriend’s body, and felt a sudden burst of pleasure that Juliet had actually been worried that she wouldn’t forgive her, that that had actually _mattered_ to her.

 

“Get dry,” Juliet told her, blue eyes serious. “Change. I’ll stick your stuff in the tumble-dryer. And then, Liz, please... _read that letter_.”

 

Liz hesitated, and then, finally, she agreed.

 

***

 

There was a perfunctory knock on the bedroom door. Lester didn’t even bother to open his eyes, but Lyle knew that if they had been open, they would have rolled heavenwards. “Come in, Liz,” Lester called.

 

The door swung open, and Liz uncharacteristically hovered on the threshold. “S’raining again,” she observed.

 

“Yeah,” Lyle said, reflecting that Liz was unlikely to be disturbed by the sight of him holding her father in his arms. “You get wet?”

 

            Liz shrugged. “Kind of.”

 

            She came into the room and perched on the end of the bed, one leg crossed under her. She had been crying recently, Lyle thought, and there was a dull-edged sadness on her face, but it was low tide to the heartbreaking flood that had been there just after Jamie had died.

 

            “Where’s Juliet?” he asked.

 

            “Downstairs,” Liz said. “Doing ballet-type stretches.”

 

            “Oh,” Lyle said. Lester shifted in his arms and settled again; he wondered if Liz had had any reason for coming in here, or if she’d just done it randomly.

 

            Lyle watched Liz lick her lips nervously, then open and close her mouth once or twice as if she was working up to saying something.

 

            “Spit it out,” he ordered. She gave him the middle finger, but obediently spoke.

 

            “I read it.”

 

            Lyle could practically feel Lester snap to alertness, blue eyes flying open. “Well _done_.”

 

            Liz flushed. “Thank Juliet.”

 

            “I will,” Lester assured her. “What did it say?”

 

            “Lots of stuff,” Liz said vaguely. Lyle could see in her face that some of that ‘stuff’ would never be repeated by Liz, no matter who asked. “Some of it was important. Some was personal. Some wasn’t... He said it was for Nicky and me to decide who got his Swiss Army knife. You know, the one with his initials on.”

 

            “Yeah,” Lyle said. “And?”

 

            “Nicky won’t have it. He says it’s mine by right, whatever that means. So I’m keeping it.”

 

            “All right,” Lester said.

 

            “The sketchbooks are for you, Dad,” Liz continued as if he’d said nothing. “Except for some stuff he did specially for Mum. He said you already knew but he wanted to make sure.”  


            “Yes,” her father agreed. It had gone to his heart to read that. He had taught Jamie to draw as much as anyone had taught the boy to do something that came to him easy as breathing, taken him to art galleries, bought him sketchbooks and pencils, encouraged him constantly. ‘Yes’ was a suitably neutral monosyllable; it hid more than ten years of his son’s life catalogued in the boy’s own art.

 

            Liz paused, staring at the middle distance, her eyes fixed on the wall. “He says I have to live and love it. Do everything I want to and not too much I don’t. He says I have to not let being sad kill my own dreams. He says I have to grow up and not worry about what he would have been like.”

 

            Lyle drew a startled breath, and felt his professional blank face automatically slide down over the natural expression of total astonishment like steel shutters. That was definitely not all the ‘stuff’, but it was certainly a lot more of it than he’d ever thought any of them would hear.

 

            “Sounds like good advice to me,” he said eventually, and Liz nodded and hauled herself up the bed to hug her father and Lyle.

 

            “He said to remember that there was a future,” she said, voice slightly muffled. “That this was the end of one game... but the tournament wasn’t over.”

 

            It had stopped raining outside, the last of the rainfall over. Tomorrow would dawn half-cloudy, half-sunny. There would be Liz and Juliet’s GCSEs on the horizon, the summer holiday, Liz’s sixteenth birthday, Nicky’s move to a secondary school, and of course, more dinosaurs than a sci-fi TV channel, Helen bloody Cutter, the Special Forces’ romantic entanglements and the day-to-day running of the ARC, and all this they would have to cope with. Jamie would be there in their minds, the ghost in the corner with a bright smile and brighter eyes, making it harder for them, but they would still manage, however haphazardly.

 

            Because – as he had reminded them - there was a future. And it was theirs.


End file.
